Reddit’s I.P.O. Is a Content material Moderation Success Story
Redditors howled at these adjustments — and Mr. Wong’s successor as C.E.O., Ellen Pao, was chased out by a horde of offended customers — however the firm’s pivot to respectability was an simple success. Reddit’s picture has step by step improved beneath a co-founder, Steve Huffman, who got here again in 2015 to run the location as chief government, and Reddit was capable of construct the ad-based enterprise mannequin that sustains it at present.
Particularly, I need to single out three steps Reddit took to wash up its platform, all of which had been instrumental in paving the way in which for the corporate’s public debut.
First, the corporate took intention at dangerous areas, fairly than dangerous people or dangerous posts.
Reddit, in contrast to different social media websites, is organized by subject; customers can be part of “subreddits” dedicated to gardening, anime or dad jokes. That meant that after the corporate made new guidelines banning hate speech, harassment and extremism, it confronted an essential query: Ought to we implement the brand new guidelines person by person or publish by publish, as new violations are reported, or ought to we proactively shut down complete subreddits the place these guidelines have been persistently damaged?
Reddit, to its credit score, selected the much less common possibility. It nuked hundreds of offensive and hateful subreddits, attaching culpability to not particular person posts or customers however to the areas the place poisonous issues continuously occur, on the idea that on-line areas, like offline ones, usually develop customs and norms which might be laborious to dislodge.
Harsh because it was, the strategy labored. Years later, when researchers studied these adjustments, they discovered that Reddit’s subreddit bans had led to a measurable discount in general toxicity on the location. Customers who had frequented the banned communities largely both left Reddit totally or modified their conduct. The poisonous areas didn’t reconstitute themselves, and rule-abiding Redditors obtained the advantages of a cleaner, much less hateful platform.
