Back in 2005, during their senior year at the University of Virginia, Huffman and his roommate Alexis Ohanian met with influential coder and entrepreneur Paul Graham, who helped them brainstorm “the front page of the internet” concept and invited them to pitch his new startup incubator, Y Combinator. But he has never been accused of outright villainy, at least not until this year, when he announced a plan that most observers might assume is rather administrative and vanilla: charging third-party apps, bots, and companies for using Reddit’s Data API.Īlong with his Reddit co-founders, Huffman helped define the 21 st-century internet-for better and for worse, and with the help of figures who’d later become tech overlords in their own right. As CEO, Huffman has courted controversy with many of these moves, both within and beyond the freewheeling platform.
Huffman has occupied the hot seat during every Reddit flashpoint since: the early-Trump-era bans of r/pizzagate and r/altright, both hotbeds of extremism and conspiracy theories the 2019 investment from Chinese company Tencent, which Redditors feared would interfere with the site’s free-speech ethos the anti–hate speech policies that the company implemented during the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests the subsequent booting of notorious spaces like r/The_Donald and Reddit’s supposed “censorship” of market-breaking r/WallStreetBets traders in 2021. The whole reason the co-founder is currently in charge of the internet’s most important message-board hub is that he was asked to come back in July 2015, in order to quash a racist, sexist Redditor backlash that had contributed to the resignation of then-CEO Ellen Pao. Steve Huffman has tussled publicly with Reddit’s users before, and he wants everyone to know it.
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