Redditors howled over these changes, and Wong’s successor as CEO, Ellen Pao, was driven out by a horde of offended users — but the corporate’s turn toward respectability has been an undeniable success. Reddit’s image progressively improved under co-founder Steve Huffman, who returned in 2015 to guide the location as CEO, and Reddit was in a position to construct an ad-based business model that sustains it today.
In particular, I would like to focus on three steps that Reddit took to scrub up its platform, all of which played a key role in paving the best way for the corporate’s public debut.
First, the corporate focused on bad spaces, not bad people or bad jobs.
Reddit, unlike other social networking sites, is organized by topic; users can join “subreddits” dedicated to gardening, anime, or dad jokes. This meant that when the corporate introduced recent policies prohibiting hate speech, harassment, and extremism, it faced a vital query: should we implement the brand new policies user-by-user, or by mail, as recent violations are reported, or should we proactively shut down all the subreddit, during which rules were consistently broken?
Reddit, admittedly, selected the less popular option. It detonated 1000’s of offensive and hateful subreddits, assigning blame to not individual posts or users, but to spaces where toxic things often occur, based on the speculation that online spaces, like offline ones, often shape customs and norms which can be difficult to be refuted.
Although it was difficult, the approach proved effective. Years later, when researchers studied these changes, they found that Reddit’s subreddit bans led to a measurable reduction in overall toxicity on the location. Users who visited blocked communities largely either left Reddit altogether or modified their behavior. Toxic spaces didn’t recreate themselves, and rule-abiding Redditors benefited from a cleaner, less hateful platform.
