[6][8] During spring break of his senior year at UVA, Huffman and college roommate Alexis Ohanian[3] drove to Boston, Massachusetts, to attend a lecture[9] delivered by English programmer-entrepreneur Paul Graham.
[8][13] The site's audience grew rapidly in its first few months, and by August 2005, Huffman noticed their habitual user-base had grown so large that he no longer needed to fill the front page with content himself.
[17] Huffman spent several months backpacking in Costa Rica[18] before co-creating the travel website Hipmunk with Adam Goldstein, an author and software developer, in 2010.
[23] On July 10, 2015, Reddit hired Huffman as CEO following the resignation of Ellen Pao[24] and during a particularly difficult time for the company.
[3] Since returning to Reddit, Huffman instituted a number of technological changes including an updated mobile site and stronger infrastructure, as well as new content guidelines.
These included a ban on content that incites violence, quarantining some material users might find offensive, and removing communities "that exist solely to ... make Reddit worse for everyone else".
[3][25] Shortly after returning, Huffman wrote that "neither Alexis nor I created Reddit to be a bastion of free speech, but rather as a place where open and honest discussion can happen.
"[26] In a 2012 interview, Ohanian had used the phrase "bastion of free speech" specifically to describe Reddit, as noted by The New Yorker and The Verge.
[34] Following this post, Huffman took responsibility for the comment modifications, writing that "Our community team is pretty pissed at me, so I most assuredly won't do this again.
"[39][40] On June 1, 2020, Huffman published an open letter as Reddit's CEO, titled "Remember to be Human - Black lives matter",[41] which addressed the topic of racism on the platform.
[45] The announced changes led to planning for protests across the platform scheduled for June 12, 2023, including several thousand subreddits temporarily switching to private-only access for 48 hours.
[50] After the AMA, some subreddits announced their suspension of public access would be indefinite, until API policy issues were addressed.
[54][55] In 2017, he told The New York Times that without net neutrality protections, "you give internet service providers the ability to choose winners and losers".