Can Steve Huffman Save Reddit From Itself?

Steve Huffman co-founded Reddit. Sold Reddit. Watched Reddit grow. Watched Reddit flounder. Watched Reddit mutiny. Now hes back, to try to save Reddit from itself.

- Benjamin Wallace

Steve Huffman was on his couch when Reddit mutinied. Huffman had co-founded the popular news-ranking site with Alexis Ohanian in 2005  and left in 2009 after selling it to Condé Nast. In the years since, he had watched from afar with a mix of pride, as the site grew into the 11th largest in the U.S.; remorse, for selling too early; and frustration, as Reddit failed to mature and was repeatedly wracked by disruptive forces. Reddit is, above all, a collection of nearly 10,000 bulletin boards called sub-Reddits, which range from the general, like Politics and Technology and Food, to the more particular, like one called Whalebait, where people post snapshots of everyone’s favorite cetacean. Users can vote posts up or down, and through crowd curation the most favored items ascend to Reddit’s front page. In this way, the site has become the web’s foremost meme engine, the place where things go viral, and with 200 million regular visitors, it is able to unblushingly call itself “the front page of the internet.”

But more than other user-generated sites, such as YouTube and Wikipedia, Reddit over the years has developed a culture that can at times be untamable. It is one that venerates anonymity and free speech and the idea that you can find your tribe, however small and marginalized, within the site, and it is reflected in the company’s power structure: The number of people the site employs is dwarfed by the horde of moderators who voluntarily tend to the individual sub-Reddits and make the whole thing run.