“There have been multiple big moments, and that was one of them,” Huffman says of shutting down r/TheDonald. Such moments hinge around a conflict of values, he says, “almost always freedom of speech and expression on one side and safety on the other.” Historically, Reddit would have instinctively erred on the side of freedom of speech. But now the site’s management sees that there are compromises to be made.

More recently, Huffman says he and his team have become more comfortable acting against people who test the boundaries of the platform’s policies, posting content that almost but doesn’t quite break the rules. “One thing we developed over the last few years is we have a lot more courage to call that out,” he says—Reddit is increasingly happy to ban, block, or delete a user, or post a policy and then change it afterward. Huffman is also trying to encourage more users to report problem content, including by improving the process for flagging nonconsensual sexualization, which he judged to be forcing victims to go through a humiliating and complex process to report images or videos posted without their consent.

Researchers who study hate speech and moderation on social media have looked at Reddit’s quarantines and bans and concluded that they have worked. Unsurprisingly, if you ban Nazis from your platform, you end up with fewer Nazis on your platform. “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. With a host of caveats, he also says that Reddit has improved the community on its platform and made some significant calls. “These would have been kind of unthinkable moderation decisions in 2015, 2016.”

Tighter rules means that Reddit isn’t what it used to be, and that’s probably a good thing. You can still find misogyny, transphobia, and conspiracy theories, as on any large platform. 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. There’s one subreddit with more than 300,000 members that’s just pictures of bread stapled to trees. 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. “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. 

Control is also better for the bottom line. As Twitter has found out since Elon Musk’s takeover in October 2022, taking off the guard rails for the most aggressive and offensive users of your platform can alienate some would-be advertisers. There’s an edge-of-the seat itchiness to Huffman as we talk moderation, but talk of the financial upside seems to release him.

“Yes! Thank you!” Huffman almost shouts, straightening up in his chair and throwing his arms out. “Tech companies often will get accused of putting profits ahead of doing the right thing, or morals or whatever. And I can’t speak for the other platforms, but for us, doing the right thing is aligned with our business. People getting harassed and abused is bad for business, right? Pissing off advertisers is bad for business.”

Huffman met WIRED in a London WeWork in a former church that has the words “Enter, Rest and Pray” above the door. 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 says Reddit has cut an unspecified number of roles this year in a “performance management exercise,” but that the company’s headcount will grow in 2023.)

Throughout the interview, there have been flashes of Huffman’s slightly more radical, early-Reddit side. We talk briefly about r/WallStreetBets, the subreddit that effectively created the meme-stock movement, as Redditors pushed stock in the video game retailer GameStop to more than 100 times its value, wiping out a couple of short-selling hedge funds. Some small traders made a lot of money, but others sustained losses. Does Reddit have any responsibility to act when people do risky things because of content they see on its platform?