![]() ![]() A month later, the rules changed again, and r/coontown was removed from the site, along with several other openly hateful subreddits. “The content there is offensive to many but does not violate our current rules for banning,” Huffman said in an Ask Me Anything at the time. ![]() Communities where threats of violence were common, including r/rapingwomen, were banned, but some large, openly racist forums, including r/coontown, were not. Within weeks of his return, the site began quarantining the worst subreddits, making them harder to find and adding warnings that they included offensive content. The previous CEO, Ellen Pao, had tried and failed to clean up the site, and her departure helped draw mainstream media attention to the platform’s grimmer spaces. Huffman came back to Reddit in the midst of a firestorm. Reddit got progressively tougher on communities that pushed the boundaries of acceptability. (Reddit later became an independent company, with Condé Nast parent Advance Publications remaining a shareholder.) In 2006, the founders sold the site to Condé Nast, which also owns WIRED, and Huffman left in 2009. But for much of the next decade, Reddit was a rare popular platform that didn’t show even rhetorical interest in getting rid of its darkest spaces. There were only a handful of rules, or principles, that all Redditors were expected to abide by: Doxxing was not OK, and incitement to violence was eventually banned. “There were, like, three racist posts during those first two years, and I just deleted them.” Aside from an occasional intervention by the founders or the volunteer moderators who create and police subreddits, Reddit let pretty much anything go on its platform during its early years. “They seem like such easy decisions right now,” Huffman says. Now, Huffman looks back with amusement at the site’s early innocent days, when the founders’ first two moderation quandries were whether users were allowed to use swear words or to criticize Reddit. Huffman cofounded Reddit in 2005 with his college roommate Alexis Ohanian. ![]()
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