The lobby space is, like Reddit, a throwback to an earlier vision of tech low pastel sofas, fridges, and the tick-tick of a pingpong game in play feel antediluvian at a moment of layoffs and cutbacks across the industry. Huffman met WIRED in a London WeWork in a former church that has the words “Enter, Rest and Pray” above the door. “I’m trying to stay positive through some things right now and stapling a tortilla to this tree makes me happy,” one user posted last month. It’s called r/breadstapledtotrees and while it’s not the most active of communities, six years after it was created it’s still going. There’s one subreddit with more than 300,000 members that’s just pictures of bread stapled to trees. But stripped back to the pre-Nazi message board feel, with guardrails to stop the darkest content encroaching, much of the site feels familiar and comforting for early millennial internet users-largely wholesome, consciously strange, filled with ironic shitposting, earnest advice, and adverts for health drinks. You can still find misogyny, transphobia, and conspiracy theories, as on any large platform. Tighter rules means that Reddit isn’t what it used to be, and that’s probably a good thing. “These would have been kind of unthinkable moderation decisions in 2015, 2016.” With a host of caveats, he also says that Reddit has improved the community on its platform and made some significant calls. “These are pretty, you know, commonsense, straightforward things to do,” says Eric Gilbert, an associate professor in the School of Information at the University of Michigan who has studied the quarantining of r/TheDonald. Unsurprisingly, if you ban Nazis from your platform, you end up with fewer Nazis on your platform. Researchers who study hate speech and moderation on social media have looked at Reddit’s quarantines and bans and concluded that they have worked. Tighter rules mean that Reddit isn’t what it used to be-that’s probably a good thing. In 2016, Reddit banned r/PizzaGate-a QAnon-driven subreddit that propagated the conspiracy theory that a cabal of pedophiles led by Hilary Clinton performed Satanic rituals in the basement of a Washington DC pizzeria-for breaching its policies on doxxing. In the years that followed, Reddit became progressively tougher in acting against communities that pushed the boundaries of acceptability, even where it meant making decisions that were politically controversial. A month later, the rules changed again, and r/coontown was removed from the site, along with several other openly hateful subreddits. “The content there is offensive to many but does not violate our current rules for banning,” Huffman said in an Ask Me Anything at the time. Communities where threats of violence were common, including r/rapingwomen, were banned, but some large, openly racist forums, including r/coontown, were not. Within weeks of his return, the site began quarantining the worst subreddits, making them harder to find and adding warnings that they included offensive content. The previous CEO, Ellen Pao, had tried and failed to clean up the site, and her departure helped draw mainstream media attention to the platform’s grimmer spaces. Huffman came back to Reddit in the midst of a firestorm. Reddit got progressively tougher on communities that pushed the boundaries of acceptability. (Reddit later became an independent company, with Condé Nast parent Advance Publications remaining a shareholder.) In 2006, the founders sold the site to Condé Nast, which also owns WIRED, and Huffman left in 2009. But for much of the next decade, Reddit was a rare popular platform that didn’t show even rhetorical interest in getting rid of its darkest spaces. There were only a handful of rules, or principles, that all Redditors were expected to abide by: Doxxing was not OK, and incitement to violence was eventually banned. “There were, like, three racist posts during those first two years, and I just deleted them.” Aside from an occasional intervention by the founders or the volunteer moderators who create and police subreddits, Reddit let pretty much anything go on its platform during its early years. “They seem like such easy decisions right now,” Huffman says. Now, Huffman looks back with amusement at the site’s early innocent days, when the founders’ first two moderation quandries were whether users were allowed to use swear words or to criticize Reddit. Huffman cofounded Reddit in 2005 with his college roommate Alexis Ohanian.

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