There are users that “misbehave” on Reddit but they a minority, the chief executive of the content sharing website said Wednesday.
“Yes, there is misbehavior, but that’s generally in the minority, and it’s very important to us that we make the voices of various groups on Reddit, the volume of their voices proportionate to the sizes,” Steve Huffman told CNBC at the Web Summit conference in Lisbon, Portugal.
“Because I think people – not just Redditors, but people – are fundamentally good and interesting and if you give them an opportunity to do so they will be.”
Reddit has tried to crack down on a number of controversial communities, called ‘subreddits,’ on the site in recent years, due to the distribution of offensive content. The site has moved to “quarantine” certain subreddits, essentially preventing users from posting images or generating revenue, in an effort to quell the prominence of these online groups.
One particular group, r/The_Donald, was brought into question last year during the U.S. presidential election battle between Democrat candidate Hillary Clinton and Republican Donald Trump. r/The_Donald is a subreddit devoted to supporters of the now-President Trump.
Huffman himself was at the center of a row with the subreddit in November last year. The Reddit CEO admitted he had edited comments from Reddit users criticizing him, by changing references to his own username and replacing them with moderators of the pro-Trump community.
Huffman said: “We generally at Reddit want these things to play out, let communities be themselves, let people be themselves. But there are limits to that. In the same way there are limits to free speech in the U.S., there’s limits to what you can do on Reddit. Where we draw the line is when it effects people’s safety.”
Addressing the fact that he edited users’ comments, he said: “That was done in jest… it wasn’t totally received that way but I think within our community it wasn’t the craziest thing that’s happened on Reddit.”
