Reddit’s IPO is a content moderation success story

Redditors cried foul over these changes — and so did Mr. Wong’s successor as CEO, Ellen Pao chased away by a horde of angry users – but the company’s pivot to respectability was an undeniable success. Reddit’s image has gradually improved under the leadership of co-founder Steve Huffman, who returned to run the site as CEO in 2015, and Reddit was able to build the ad-based business model that powers the site today.

In particular, I’d like to mention three steps Reddit has taken to clean up its platform, all of which played a major role in paving the way for the company’s public debut.

First, the company focused on bad spaces, rather than bad individuals or bad posts.

Reddit, unlike other social media sites, is organized by topic; users can join “subreddits” dedicated to gardening, anime or dad jokes. That meant that once the company instituted new rules banning hate speech, harassment and extremism, it faced an important question: should we enforce the new rules on a user-by-user or post-by-post basis as new violations are reported, or should we proactively close entire networks? subreddits where these rules are consistently broken?

To Reddit’s credit, he chose the less popular option. It destroyed thousands of offensive and hateful subreddits, placing blame not on individual posts or users, but on the places where toxic things often happen, based on the theory that online spaces, like offline ones, often develop habits and norms that are difficult to to be dismantled.

As hard as it was, the approach worked. Years later, when researchers studied these changes, they found that Reddit’s subreddit bans had led to a measurable reduction in overall toxicity on the site. Users who had visited the banned communities largely left Reddit or changed their behavior. The toxic spaces didn’t recreate themselves, and law-abiding Redditors got the benefits of a cleaner, less hateful platform.