In Germany, Reddit is not as well known as Facebook, but the social network is still one of the most visited websites. In an interview, CEO Steve Huffman talks about why his company has opened an office in Berlin and how Reddit deals with the much criticized extremist content.
Mr. Huffman, why is Germany the first non-English speaking market?
Steve Huffman: We’ve had German-speaking communities on Reddit for a long time, and our German audience grew 47 percent last year. That’s a good foundation. The question is, can we grow faster all over the world? Germany is a good extension because many people can speak both languages and the English-language content serves as a reserve.
Did Germany choose Reddit or vice versa?
I’d say this is mutual, but Germans picked Reddit first. The German-speaking subreddit r / de is the first non-English community that I can remember.
You are currently opening an office in Berlin, in a co-working space in Mitte. What kind of jobs are these?
We now have half a dozen employees for a number of tasks: There are people we are hiring here specifically to work on our German expansion. So these will be community managers who will help the subreddits grow. It will be salespeople who will help grow the business. Engineers will not necessarily do Germany-specific work. Because with the pandemic, we have become much more flexible when it comes to where to fill positions. We hire great talent wherever they live. And there is a lot of talent here in Germany.
So you can work 100 percent from home on Reddit?
Around a third of the workforce works from home. In the near future we’ll just see what people want to do and what develops from it. But during the pandemic, we basically said we were hiring everywhere. Even if I said we all had to go back to an office, a third of the company wouldn’t. You’re nowhere near an office, so there’s no going back.
What do users find on Reddit that they can’t find on other social networks?
People come to Reddit when they have nowhere else to go. For example, those who wrestle with their sexuality and may be ashamed or afraid to turn to friends and family. In the beginning, Reddit only had external links. It was a place where you could see what was new and interesting on the internet. But over the years it has grown beyond that. Personally, I started a new relationship with Reddit a few years ago when I stopped drinking. I achieved this through an alcohol cessation community. And I don’t think I would have made it without this community.
Compared to Facebook with almost 2 billion, your 52 million daily active users are pretty few inside.
If we were as big as Facebook, the world would be a better place. And I know that such words are easy to say. But we’ve been around since 2005. When we first started, Facebook was for college kids. YouTube was just four months old and Twitter and TikTok and Instagram and Snap and Pinterest didn’t exist yet. So we grew up with our own image and are working on what is important for us and our users. But I’m not worried about other platforms when it comes to market share. I’m worried about TikTok for completely different reasons.
Why are you worried about TikTok?
Teens and children in and around the US send their face, voice, and location straight to China. Even if we like to criticize the other big tech platforms. They operate under a number of restrictions and rules that TikTok does not apply to. In the long run, this is likely to be deeply problematic. I’m surprised that we talk so much about platforms like Facebook. TikTok actually poses a greater threat.
Reddit has been widely criticized in the past for subreddits that focused on controversial or disturbing content, including subreddits about Nazism. The Nazi subreddit wasn’t banned until 2017 after Reddit long tolerated such content. Has your opinion on extremist content changed over the years?
We thought about it for a long time. In the beginning our position was that we should accept everything. We wanted it to be a real, real place run by users, not editors or gatekeepers. We didn’t have a lot of problematic content in the first couple of years. But then we discovered groups that any reasonable person would consider problematic. But when we started we basically had no guidelines.
And then? In 2015 you returned to the company after a break.
Since I got back, we’ve been fairly systematic in updating our policies and fully enforcing those policies. It’s really hard work. We updated the content policy maybe a dozen times. And every time we do that, we enforce it more and more. It’s a never-ending job, but I think we’ve made a lot of progress.
A prominent recent case was the closure of a forum used to spread misinformation about Covid. You stated that the reason was that the users did something that you call “brigading”, that is, coordinated actions to attack other forums. In principle, should there be a space for people to say things that are wrong?
Spreading medical misinformation is not covered by our content guidelines. But not all of these posts are such medical misinformation. Sometimes it’s just plain dissenting opinions. This is what we saw in this particular community: people who debate or disapprove of government policies. In principle, it is not our aim to stop this kind of debate, because that would be an attack on democracy and it would be extremely problematic.
This community was banned anyway. Where do you draw the line?
We have spent a lot of time making sure our debates are fair. We had a problem with the Covid community because they organized attacks outside of their community to disrupt other groups. That’s not acceptable on Reddit. I fully understand that we sometimes have to make decisions to prohibit or not to prohibit something. These choices are not popular. And that’s not the most enjoyable part of my job, but I think it’s probably one of the most important.
Keyword WallStreetBets. Will you try to prevent similar actions in the future?
Oh of course not! WallStreetBets was fantastic. It showed what was best about Reddit. The power of community. The only ones who get this upset are traditional financial institutions. And it should because it’s a power shift.
This interview is at first Business punk appeared. The long version of the interview will appear in the magazine on December 2, 2021.