Alexis Ohanian is thinking a lot about the past these days. This June will mark 10 years since he and his University of Virginia roommate Steve Huffman co-founded the social news site Reddit after moving into a two-bedroom apartment in Medford, Massachusetts, where they started coding what would eventually come to be known as “the front page of the internet”.
After a few years of charity work, Ohanian returned to Reddit in November as chairman. His two-bedroom startup has come a long way. Last month the site had almost 170 million unique visitors and over half a million communities (“subreddits”) covering almost every conceivable subject. But life has changed since Reddit was founded and, like peers such as Twitter and Facebook, it is coping with ever-changing user habits and the responsiblity that comes with being a durable web property. Reddit is having to grow up.
Since his return, Ohanian has turned his immediate thoughts to things like the Reddit mobile experience and the launch of new community tools. “In a way, I’d never really left Reddit. I was still an adviser and never emotionally left it, because it was such a fundamental and formative part of my life. I eventually saw a chance to really help in a way I couldn’t have earlier,” he says. “It feels good to be back, because there’s so much more we want to do.”
Part of the task confronting the site, he says, involves continuing to lead the charge when it comes to issues involving privacy and the open internet. In January, Reddit published its first transparency report, covering requests in 2014 from governments and law enforcement agencies. The Electronic Frontier Foundation quickly found a lot to like in it.
But it has other issues to deal with. A few weeks after releasing that report Reddit announced it was clamping down on revenge porn following the leaking of nude photos of celebrities, many of which made it on to the site. The new policy went into effect in March and encourages anyone who believes that photos, videos or digital images of them “in a state of nudity or engaged in any act of sexual conduct” are being circulated on Reddit without their consent to contact the site so that they can be taken down.
“This was a decision we made at our first big company-wide meeting about two months after I got back,” Ohanian says. “In 2005, there were no smartphones. Online data storage didn’t really exist. So we wanted to update our privacy policy to reflect that change.
“Reddit was created for people to speak freely and authentically and also for us to protect and value privacy. We’re sort of the anti-Facebook in that regard. All you need is a username and password. We don’t even need your email.We’ve got work to do, don’t get me wrong, but the invasion of privacy policy we stood for as a company – it was so heartening to see the support from the Reddit community and to see Twitter and Facebook to a certain extent following suit within a few weeks.”
Reddit is growing up in other ways. The company’s CEO Ellen Pao – who initially joined on an interim basis around the time Ohanian came back – recently made news for banning salary negotiations in the hiring process to tackle the pay gap between men and women. She also talks to potential hires about their ideas on workplace diversity. Ohanian declined to speak about Pao, who recently lost a closely watched gender bias case against her former employer, venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. But those are among the kinds of moves he says we should expect to see Reddit lead the way on more.
Among other recent milestones in Reddit’s transformation is President Barack Obama personally thanking the site and its users in a handwritten note in February. “Wish I could upvote every one of you for helping keep the internet open and free,” Obama wrote, using the site’s own terminology, about their activism around net neutrality. Ohanian was especially happy to see that, not least because he’s long been an opponent of moves to route some internet traffic through a so-called “fast lane” – pushing, instead, to keep a level playing field for all users.
“This fight will never be over,” he says. “The internet is too transformative for incumbents to not want to try to stifle or curb it – incumbents in the sense of multinational corporations, governments, take your pick. We got a huge win with net neutrality, and seeing the Obama letter just blew me away. That was the work of thousands of websites that came together, not just Reddit, and motivated people to pick up phones. The biggest threat to the internet is, frankly, always going to be complacency. I want to see more and more of us activated and people thinking of themselves as defenders of it. The way we stay vigilant is anytime something comes up, we’re OK picking up the phone and making that call and being engaged so that anyone who holds office knows they have to be on Team Internet.”
It’s against this backdrop that Ohanian, who returned to the company a month after it raised new funding ($50m) from investors including Jared Leto and Snoop Dogg, is considering fresh ideas for expanding the site and its influence. Inspiration may be found in Reddit’s origin story. Ohanian was already thinking about the product that would become Reddit as a college student studying overseas, even if he didn’t realise it at the time.
In early 2003, while taking a few college classes a week as a sophomore living in London, the future entrepreneur would head over to Speakers’ Corner in Hyde Park on Sundays. “It was people ranting about whatever they cared about,” he recalls. “Some of them were crazy. Some were very earnest. Crowds would form and people would debate. It was a transformative experience for me. Before that, I’d always understood speech abstractly. But when you see people standing old-school on a box – it was a very clear indication to me of what could happen if you could just distribute that a little better. And make it accessible to anyone with an internet connection.”
Reddit is as good an example as any that when enough people are given a microphone, the darker side of human nature tends to manifest itself. Ohanian acknowledges that Reddit has wrestled with that reality for much of its existence, and the issue has appeared particularly acute lately with the Gamergate controversy, trolling and offensive content. In a blog about a month ago, post he and other Reddit leaders conceded that, as revenge porn multiplied “we missed a chance to be a leader in social media when it comes to protecting your privacy”.
There’s also the question of offensive content in general. Even a cursory examination of lists of subreddits can turn up particularly dark content, like the subreddit /r/picsofdeadkids. Ohanian cites his Speakers’ Corner experience in arguing such voices are not representative, and will eventually be drowned out by saner ones: “They’re actually in the minority. It’s important for us to make sure we’re creating an environment where enough speech is possible. I’m a real believer in counter-speech when it comes to crazy stuff we don’t like.”
Reddit will always have to deal with the unusual as long as it remains popular. Ohanian’s focus now is to make sure the company starts to put more of its own content in the spotlight. Earlier this year he announced the launch of Reddit’s podcast Upvoted, which has already surpassed 600,000 downloads. The goal is to use it to dive deep into the site’s content and learn more about which items are most resonating with users and why.
In recent days, Reddit announced that it’s expanding its podcast via an opt-in, weekly newsletter called Upvoted Weekly. It’s a human-curated collection of the best of Reddit from the previous week.The site also recently rolled out the capability for embeddable ability to embed comments from public subreddits. “We’re also going to be making inroads in mobile, finally,” Ohanian says. “We started in the pre-smartphone era, and we’ll be refreshing the mobile web experience, as well as mobile apps. The podcast was our first go at editorial content. It’s essentially us looking at things that bubble up across any of the Reddit communities and seeing if there’s another story there. It’s us saying we have this amazing newsroom, so to speak, that has content creators all over the world, and our job is to figure out the best way to deliver all that great stuff.
“Bottom line: We’re very cognizant of the fact as large as Reddit is, we want to grow even more.”
Curriculum vitae
Age 32
Education University of Virginia
Career 2005 co-founder, reddit.com 2007 launches breadpig 2009 microfinance as a Kiva fellow in Yerevan, Armenia 2010 helps launch travel site hipmunk 2014 executive chair, Reddit