Steve Huffman

[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".

"Fuck spez!" written by Reddit users across the July 2023 canvas of r/place