It began on the Thursday night that much of Reddit—the eleventh biggest site on the American Internet, the one that Steve Huffman helped found when he was barely more than a teenager—went dark. Huffman didn’t work for Reddit then, hadn’t worked there in five years. A towhead who, at 31, still looks like a high school sophomore, he’d started a new company, and it was finally going well enough that he’d planned to take a day off in July to go up to Sonoma for a friend’s birthday. Then Huffman pulled up Reddit—and it wasn’t there. “I was like, is this for real? How is this happening? This is insane,” says Huffman. “I was like, what the fuck, man?”

Reddit is huge. It’s a gigantic collection of message boards that are tended by volunteer moderators and viewed by 202 million unique visitors each month, according to the company. Much of the content that pops up in other media—from Buzzfeed to the morning news—is discovered on Reddit. And it can be a powerful attention engine. Remember that unemployed father who handed out his resume in front of Busch Stadium last summer? A photo of him bubbled up on the front page of Reddit; his story spread all over the web, he hired a PR person to field media calls, and employers from around the world bombarded him with job offers. That’s what Reddit can do.

Steve Huffman, the new chief executive of Reddit, in San Francisco, July 16, 2015. Huffman, who co-founded Reddit in 2005, reappeared last Friday as chief executive to pull off a turnaround of the online message board, which has grappled with a series of missteps. (Jason Henry/The New York Times) Jason Henry/The New York Times/Redux

Huffman started Reddit with his college buddy, Alexis Ohanian, to be the front page for the Internet, and from its earliest days, Reddit positioned itself as a forum for free speech. Sometimes people said stupid things, but Huffman and Ohanian mostly let them. It was a reflection of the democratic principles of the original web; anyone could say anything. And like the web’s founders, Huffman and Ohanian harbored the naïve illusion that when left to our own devices, humanity’s greater good would prevail.

But a decade after Reddit launched, it has blossomed into a platform for racist, anti-Semitic, misogynistic and other hateful conversations. A March white paper by The Southern Poverty Law Center says it’s more vile than the hate site started by a former Alabama Klan leader, and accuses it of “providing a home for anti-black racists — and some of the most virulent and violent propaganda around.” The harder its leaders worked to establish new behavioral norms on the site over the past year, the more vocal the trolls became.

'I was like, is this for real? How is this happening? This is insane.' Steve Huffman

Meanwhile, the volunteer moderators were feeling increasingly alienated by the haphazard policy-making while the site's overseers failed to make moderators’ tools to any better for managing conversations. Much of the site was still running on the code Huffman wrote a decade ago. So when a popular employee who’d been a liaison between them and the company was fired unexpectedly, a group of moderators for the site’s most popular chatboards switched their sections, or "subreddits," to “private," which meant those sections effectively disappeared. Just like that, most of Reddit went quiet.

Huffman and Ohanian jumped on the phone. Until recently, the pair hadn’t been close; a falling out years ago had left them angry and distant. But this was an emergency. Ohanian, 32, who is a gregarious, charismatic guy with a big heart and the best of intentions, was then Reddit’s executive chair. He’d recently come back to the company fulltime, reporting to interim CEO Ellen Pao, which meant that it was on him to figure out what to do.

'I thought, this time Reddit might not survive.' Steve Huffman

And instead of making things better, he’d somehow made them worse. He logged onto Reddit to talk with the moderators, but they bridled at what they saw as vague promises and corporate-speak. And at some point, after hours of answering questions from moderators, he made a dumb joke. (You should never make a dumb joke to an angry online community.) So, like divorced but cordial parents gathering at the bedside of a sick child, Huffman and Ohanian put aside their differences to focus on What To Do Next. As Huffman paced the length of his living room that morning, he instructed Ohanian: apologize. Immediately. Often. Over and over again. And promise you’ll fix things.

For ten years, Reddit had been unbreakable. It has just kept growing. The founders feuded with each other. It kept growing. The CEO quit. The new CEO quit. The web went mobile, and Reddit did not. But it kept growing. Nude celebrity selfies starting popping up, while Reddit’s employees played whack-a-mole with the trolls and tried to refute its worsening reputation. Even then, it limped along. Now, on this July day, Reddit was broken. And for the first time ever, Huffman worried that it was unfixable. “I thought, this time Reddit might not survive,” he says.

Then Huffman knew what he had to do. He texted Sam Altman, the Y Combinator president and Reddit board member who had led a $50 million investment in the company back in 2014.1 Altman called him. By then, Pao had revealed privately her intention to resign. The board was scrambling to make a new plan. And even though Huffman didn’t say it then, that’s when he decided. He was going to try to save Reddit. “I knew I was going back,” he says. “Some of my friends were like, ‘you’re running into a burning building.” His eyes grow red here. “I was like, ‘I’ve got no choice. This is my burning building.”

NEW YORK, NY - MAY 06: Co-Founder and Executive Chair of Reddit, and Partner at Y Combinator, Alexis Ohanian speaks onstage during TechCrunch Disrupt NY 2015 - Day 3 at The Manhattan Center on May 6, 2015 in New York City. (Photo by Noam Galai/Getty Images for TechCrunch) Noam Galai/Getty Images for TechCrunch

Growing (Apart)

Huffman’s history with Reddit begins when he met Ohanian, on move-in day at the University of Virginia. Ohanian was a loquacious only child from a Baltimore suburb who’d recently undergone the adolescent transformation from the pear-shaped fat kid to a lanky, good-looking teen. He’d always been the kind of child who was very comfortable talking to grownups. Huffman was a baby-faced private school teen from the DC suburbs. He planned to major in computer science and worshipped famed programmer-entrepreneur Paul Graham.

In 2005, for their senior year spring break, Huffman convinced Ohanian to road trip up to Boston to see Graham talk about entrepreneurship. Ohanian screwed up the courage to ask Graham out for beers because, well, why not? He accepted, and maybe because of Ohanian’s charisma, or maybe because Huffman’s grasp of code showed promise, he invited them to apply for a new startup incubator he was launching, Y Combinator. They raced back to Charlottesville to develop their business plan.

For ten years, Reddit had been unbreakable. It has just kept growing.

They didn’t get in. At least not on their original idea, which was called My Mobile Menu and involved ordering food by SMS. But Graham invited the pair to return to Boston for a brainstorming session, and by the end of an hour together, they’d come up with the idea for Reddit: the front page of the Internet! As part of the first Y Combinator class, they spent a summer building it—and playing World of Warcraft (they both hit level 60). Huffman and Ohanian were collectively the first 100 users, setting up multiple accounts and posting and upvoting links to demonstrate Reddit was being used. It wasn’t so different from college that way: you didn’t want to show up at a party if no one else was there.

That fall, they also picked up a third chief. Graham suggested they merge their efforts with fellow Y Combinator alum Aaron Swartz. Already a defender of the free Internet and a programming prodigy, Swartz, then 19, had dropped out of Stanford to complete Y Combinator. The idea was that all three founders would work on both his startup, a service to help people build websites fast, and Reddit. But in practice, they only worked on Reddit. That fall, Huffman and Swartz rewrote the entire site in a more modern programming language, Python. That was when Reddit really took off.

Once users discovered Reddit, it wouldn’t stop growing. “Aaron and I used to joke about it,” says Huffman. “We’d say, ‘We didn’t add any features this month and Reddit grew. Maybe we should stop adding features. That’s the secret!’” In truth, none of them knew why growth was off the charts. Like Twitter in its earliest days, when the annoying “fail whale” wasn't enough to keep us away, Reddit had achieved the fabled product-market fit. At the time, social media was just emerging. Rupert Murdoch had recently bought MySpace. You still needed a college email address to join Facebook, whose founders lived just four miles down the road in Cambridge. And everyone was watching Reddit carefully. Google offered to buy it. Yahoo expressed interest. Then, 16 months after the guys were accepted to Y Combinator, WIRED parent company Condé Nast paid somewhere between $10 million and $20 million for the team and moved them to WIRED's offices in downtown San Francisco.

And so, full disclosure: WIRED has had a unique window into Reddit’s history. Ask the editors, and someone will invariably remember that time at a Friday night drinks bash when Huffman, who was an accomplished swing dancer as a child, took the actress Angela Kinsey for a spin around the kitchen. WIRED doesn't exactly share a corporate overlord with Reddit any longer, but when Condé Nast later spun Reddit out, Condé parent company Advance publications remained the majority shareholder, and Condé's soon-to-be CEO, Bob Sauerberg, is on the board.

Like Twitter in its earliest days, Reddit had achieved the fabled product-market fit.

Now that we’ve gotten that cleared up, I’ll tell you that it was after Condé Nast bought Reddit that things first got complicated and dark for the awkward triangle of egos that composed Reddit’s management team. Swartz had grown moody and stopped showing up to work. At one point, after he wrote a blog post envisioning his own death, Ohanian called the police to break into his apartment. Swartz laughed it off. Meanwhile, publicly, he called himself one of Reddit’s cofounders, taking credit for an idea Huffman and Ohanian believed to be theirs alone. In January of 2007, he was fired. Six years later, he hanged himself while facing a federal criminal trial on hacking and fraud charges.

Meanwhile, though Ohanian had from the beginning been the public face of Reddit, he had missed a significant amount of the action. Ohanian spent a good deal of that first Y Combinator summer in Germany, nursing his girlfriend who had had fallen from a fifth floor window. She recovered. Then in September, Ohanian’s mother was diagnosed with terminal brain cancer. He began commuting frequently between Boston and Maryland, and after the acquisition, moved home for a while. “Our relationship was largely electronic and when we were in person we didn’t talk about work a ton,” says Huffman. Ohanian’s mother died in March 2008. Huffman had taken over by then. “We were both immature at the time. There was some new friction there and we just never dealt with it,” says Huffman.

In 2009, their contracts expired and they left. Ohanian went to Armenia on a Kiva fellowship for a few months. Huffman joined forces with another entrepreneur, Adam Goldstein, to start online travel site Hipmunk, enrolling in Y Combinator for a second time. When Ohanian returned from his travel, he also joined Hipmunk's founding team, taking on a marketing role. But this time, it was different. He wasn’t exactly a founder. He wasn’t nearly as hungry for this idea. More than that, somehow both of them felt they had outgrown each other. Huffman had become a man of the valley, an even-mannered engineer with a strong product sense and a player in engineering’s varsity league. By contrast, Ohanian felt reined in by the one-note SF coding culture and kept gravitating to the political conversations unfolding around online privacy in Washington. A year in, he left Hipmunk, although he remained an advisor.3 He settled in Brooklyn Heights, vowing never to move back to San Francisco again. He and Huffman just stopped talking.

Steve Huffman, the new chief executive of Reddit, in San Francisco, July 16, 2015. Huffman, who co-founded Reddit in 2005, reappeared last Friday as chief executive to pull off a turnaround of the online message board, which has grappled with a series of missteps. (Jason Henry/The New York Times) Jason Henry/The New York Times/Redux

A Crisis Under Every Rock

Two months after Huffman becomes Reddit’s CEO for the second time, we meet at the company’s current offices. They occupy the top two floors of a small building in downtown San Francisco. Most of the 75 or so employees are crowded into the lower floor where there’s street art, bean bags, a Tiki Toss game, and above it all, scratched out in all caps, the slogan: “Balance patience and urgency.”2 We gravitate to a conference room on the nearly empty second floor. The only decoration is a prominently placed coffee table book on sand art at Burning Man. (Huffman’s a Burner.)

It has been an intense summer. On the Friday afternoon that Huffman became CEO, he met with the management team and discovered things were much worse than he’d thought. “Every rock I looked under, there was a crisis,” he says. Reddit didn’t have a growth team, which is a staple at most fast-growing social websites. The company had exactly one iOS engineer, one Android engineer, and one-and-a half mobile web engineers. It had employed a data scientist for less than a year. Then, Reddit’s newly hired engineering chief, Bethanye Blount, quit. She’d arrived a month earlier to work with Pao and, Huffman says, was concerned she might not work as well with him.

With 100 million users, Pinterest now has 600 employees. Reddit has twice the number of users, and a sixth of the staff.

Despite all of this, Huffman has laid out a vision for how to fix Reddit that centers on making the product better. That’s what will appease the moderators, who have been asking for better tools to help them tend their communities. And that’s what will help Reddit appeal to people who have not yet discovered it, and ultimately, make Reddit grow. When asked to rank order his top three priorities, Huffman doesn’t hesitate: “Ship Reddit for iOS. Ship Reddit for Android. Fix m.reddit. Create an A/B testing infrastructure. Stabilize infrastructure,” he says, taking a breath. “Those five are the top three.”

To do this, Huffman must put a new team together. A month after he arrived, he welcomed Reddit’s first ever chief technology officer, an affable engineer named Marty Weiner who was Pinterest’s second hire and put together the engineering team. Weiner was drawn by an opportunity that best proves itself through math: with 100 million users, Pinterest now has 600 employees. Reddit has twice the number of users, and a sixth of the staff. What could happen, he wondered, if Reddit actually had a functional engineering team that could prototype and ship products quickly? Weiner brings critical startup and product management expertise. It’s a great first step, but now Huffman needs a vice president of engineering, a chief operating officer, a vice president of product, and many more mobile engineers.

Huffman has also inspired the existing team, who were demoralized and overworked after a year of constant leadership change, to up their game. As Reddit’s technical founder, he has a moral authority that Pao and even Ohanian lacked. “Steve wrote most of that code and he can really actually drive to the heart of a problem,” says Ohanian. “When engineers say these things are hard because of X, Y, and Z, Steve can say, ‘X and Y aren’t that bad. Z is the problem and we can solve it.’” The company has shipped more product in the last two months than in the year before it, he says.

If you have ever landed on the site, and you aren’t a Reddit user already, you’d be forgiven for failing to make any sense of the jumbled mess.

Even with all of that, Reddit’s product issues are substantial. If you have ever landed on the site, and you aren’t a Reddit user already, you’d be forgiven for failing to make any sense of the jumbled mess of links and thumbnail-size images and jargon—Mods, Subreddits, Redditors, Admins—that assault you. It’s like a secret language for the Internet, which is why users love it, and outsiders are flummoxed by it. Huffman believes Reddit can be mainstream, embraced by the larger world. But for that to happen, he’ll need to clean up the product so that it is more straightforward for new users to try it out—without alienating the existing community members.

Huffman’s time at Hipmunk positions him well to figure this out. Hipmunk is a mobile-first travel app with an elegant and dead-simple user experience. It could make your grandfather love searching for flights. Building it was a tough slog, filled with ups and downs and more downs as he and Goldstein navigated the cutthroat online travel industry. But it now has a strong trajectory, and roughly the same number of employees as Reddit. (Don’t ask Huffman what it was like to leave Hipmunk; when I did, his eyes got really red.) It seems that Huffman couldn’t have gotten better practice for helping Reddit than building Hipmunk, which is not lost on the Reddit board. “He had built a new mobile-first business. It was a critical part of his development,” Condé Nast's Sauerberg told me. “I wish I was smart enough to say we did that on purpose.”

But product is only part of the challenge. Huffman also has to communicate with the moderators, and to make things a lot better for them quickly. After he introduced himself to new employees, the first thing Huffman did was host a forum called Ask Me Anything, in which Reddit users are invited to, well, you can figure it out. He was forthcoming in what he did know, and more important, what he didn’t. He delicately conveyed concern for Reddit’s condition without landing blame on any of its leaders. And when one redditor asked “who’s your daddy?” he answered. “My father was a GM manager for 30 years.”

The question was kind of stupid, which is a hallmark of the Reddit experience: the meaty stuff is lumped in with the goof-off comments, and there’s room for all of it. (Or most of it, at least.) But Huffman’s response showed that he understands the way power works in online communities. It only flows one way; people can say whatever stupid things they want. Managers would be wise not to. When I ask him how Reddit thinks about the relationship between the site and the moderators, he responds, “We think of ourselves as the federal government trying to create the framework and keep things loosely together.”

Back Together

Huffman works from a white Ikea desk that is positioned right next to Ohanian’s desk, which is some sort of laminated wood. Each has a mug with his Reddit knickname—“Spez” for Huffman and “kn0thing” for Ohanian—and a customized alien avatar. The fact that they work next to each other, or hell, even at the same company is a reflection of the energy each has put into dissolving the tension that brewed between them. Up until last spring, they weren’t speaking.

Ohanian had remained involved with Reddit. He stepped up to become executive chairman after Pao’s predecessor, Yishan Wong, resigned abruptly. He had been on the advisory board. He began commuting to San Francisco every other week where he headed up marketing, strategy and communications for the site. When Reddit banned nude photos and photos of people having sex that were shared without the permission of the people depicted, Ohanian was the person to talk to journalists and users about the decision. Ohanian also launched a weekly podcast, Upvoted. And he took on a vital behind-the-scenes role as a flag bearer for Reddit’s future. It was Ohanian, for example, who first recruited the new CTO, Weiner, who is the younger brother of one of Ohanian’s favorite comic artists, Zach Weiner. In May, Ohanian took up residence in a downtown San Francisco high rise (never say never) to work at Reddit again fulltime.

'It’s hard to make this not sound romantic. But the spark rekindled.' Alexis Ohanian

Huffman watched from afar. Then sometime around March, Altman first broached the subject of returning to Reddit with him. They were old friends from their Y Combinator days, and met up for a social dinner. Altman felt the idea out gently. “He said no, but the way he said it, I was like, we’ve got a shot at this,” says Altman. “He said, ‘I think about Reddit all the time.’”

That’s about the time that Huffman, at the suggestion of his therapist, dropped Ohanian an email to invite him to dinner. It caught Ohanian by surprise. “At first I was pretty resistant to it. I was like, ‘look I was living a content life without you in it. And you’ve been living a life without me in it.’” But steak dinners went a long way. They also met with Huffman’s therapist, who is also an executive coach, together. “After some really honest heartfelt emotional discussions, I don’t know,” says Ohanian. “It’s hard to make this not sound romantic. But the spark rekindled.”

Huffman echoes the sentiment, saying, “We dealt with a lot of those wounds and had some cathartic moments together and it was good,” and he adds: “We picked up where we left off. We both have so much dirt on each other that it’s refreshing to go to someone for advice when they have the entire context of your life.”

When Reddit’s board offered Huffman the job, they made it clear he needed to make up his mind about Ohanian’s role. Board member Keith Rabois remembers telling him, “You need to decide who you want on your team. If you want to work with Alexis, that’s awesome. I’m perfectly comfortable if you say no.” In the week that followed, Huffman and Ohanian worked out a lot. They met again with Huffman’s coach, who now continues to coach Huffman in a more formal capacity.

Ultimately, Huffman recognized what Ohanian brought to Reddit, and more importantly, to him. Ohanian embodied Reddit's soul, was a missionary for Reddit among the unconverted, and liked talking to the press. They’d been friends for nearly half their lives. “There are things I trust with Alexis I don’t trust with anyone else,” he says. And by the time Huffman showed up for his first day of work, things had been resolved. Well, pretty much. Says Altman, “Enough that things weren’t going to blow up. It’s probably still not sorted out, honestly.”

Troll Nation

A week after Ellen Pao stepped down as Reddit’s CEO, she published an editorial in The Washington Post in which she described herself as a victim of a massive trolling attack. “The trolls have won,” she wrote. Some of their nasty behavior was highly visible. After she’d released Reddit’s first ever harassment policy in May, a Change.org petition circulated calling for her ouster. More than 200,000 people signed it. But she also received nasty emails, some including death threats. Hackers attempted to steal her personal information and publish it online. She tried to talk to users about this on Reddit, but when she’d comment, her comments were quickly voted down to the point where no one could find them. In her Reddit goodbye letter, she wrote: “I just want to remind everyone that I am just another human; I have a family, and I have feelings.”

Reddit has a bad reputation for being a repository for hate speech. Because for all of the world’s-largest-secret-Santa programs and for every lonely teen able to find friends on Reddit, there is a small and vocal minority of bad actors trying to ruin it for everyone. And let’s face it, you’re much more likely to come into conflict with them if you are not a wealthy white man. The Internet can be an awful place for women. Or minorities. Or overweight people. Or different people. And in recent years, that’s gotten much worse. When I asked Huffman about how today’s climate for online harassment compares to the early days, he said he used to worry mostly about keeping spam off the site. “Now the challenges in front of us are greater than they were before. You’ve got people testing out boundaries and you’ve got people looking to us as, this is the only place where I can have an open conversation.” He pauses and considers his words. “And there are people with too much time on their hands,” he says. “And there’s a desensitization of the general public on various issues. You have to get more extreme to get attention.”

If Reddit is the Internet, then the Internet must not be for everyone.

Pao is one of the most recognizable faces in the debate over discrimination in the valley because of the brutal and ultimately unsuccessful gender bias lawsuit she waged against her former employer, Kleiner Perkins, earlier this year. Attacks against her escalated on the site after she introduced a set of anti-harassment policies last May. Her departure from Reddit is best classified as a mutual decision; none of the four board members with whom I spoke referenced the trolling as a reason she left. Instead, everyone chalked it up to a disagreement about the company’s potential for growth. When I reached out to her, she declined to talk for this story.

Regardless of the reason, Pao didn’t have the respect and trust of the Reddit community, and she wasn’t able to introduce new policies effectively. It’s a respect that Huffman has had from day one, in part because he has the moral authority afforded a founder. But it helps that he’s a young white wealthy man. This is a fact that is true about the Internet at large, not a criticism directed at Reddit specifically. But in light of this, Pao’s departure is particularly unfortunate, because part of the promise of the original freewheeling web was that everyone could have a voice. And much of the tragedy inherent in the rise of online harassment is that many people are now silenced. For Reddit to work—to allow the bulk of its users to continue to hold and moderate unbridled conversations—the company needed leadership in which its community had faith. Pao had to step down. But now, Reddit’s entire board consists of rich white men. Its founders are both rich white men. They’re really nice rich white men, guys who really truly care about getting it right. But if Reddit is the Internet, then the Internet must not be for everyone.

Beyond the inexorable truth that cleaning up Reddit is the right thing to do, Huffman understands there are business reasons for getting this balance right. Reddit is an advertising business. For now, Huffman is sanguine about making money. His board has instructed him to run the business at about break even, which is something he feels he can easily do. Brands are less wary about unsavory content then they used to be, he says, and they’re able to target their ads on Reddit to appear in forums that are more PG. Plus, it won’t be too hard to make the existing ad products better. “For now, there’s some low hanging fruit we will address that will allow us to make a lot more money and users won’t even notice,” he says.

Standing in as the arbiter for what passes as acceptable free speech is a tough job. But no one else in the history of American democracy has figured it out perfectly either.

Other social media sites, sites like Facebook and Twitter, hire scores of employees restricted by tight nondisclosure agreements to remove offensive content. They never promised their communities free speech. Reddit has always chosen a more open approach that relies on the community to hold itself to a higher standard. And for the most part, it does. Huffman often says that 99.8% of what happens on Reddit is copacetic. But the remaining 0.2% of 200 million users is 400,000 people. Ohanian, in particular, likes to describe Reddit’s size by comparing it to geographies. “Reddit is like two Germanys!” he said recently. In another conversation: “Reddit is bigger than Brazil.” If that’s the case, there’s a population of Reddit users the size of Minneapolis that needs stricter oversight.

Huffman is now positioned as free speech’s enforcer. Two months in, Reddit’s users have not showered him with the vitriol they directed at Pao. The same day that Pao’s Washington Post column published, Huffman released new policies to moderate offensive content. The gist was that content that incites violence would be taken down, but offensive or ugly content would otherwise remain. So r/Rapingwomen would come down because it condoned and encouraged deplorable and illegal behavior. And r/coontown would remain, but it would be much harder for people to find it. Then, three weeks later, Huffman updated the company’s policies again. He introduced the concept of “quarantining” content that is offensive by making it visible only to people who opt into it. And he banned r/coontown outright with the somewhat vague explanation: “We are banning a handful of communities that exist solely to annoy other Redditors, prevent us from improving Reddit, and generally make Reddit worse for everyone else.” Huffman thinks it's still a work in progress; standing in as the arbiter for what passes as acceptable free speech is a tough job. But to be fair, no one else in the history of American democracy has figured it out perfectly either. For Reddit to work, Huffman just needs to maintain his community’s respect while he tries his best.

But it’s a poor reflection on Reddit’s leadership, and more broadly, on all of us, that Reddit’s users could not find that respect for Pao. Earlier this year, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which was founded to help protect Internet civil liberties, published a long white paper addressing the serious challenge of online harassment. It was short on solutions, but it did suggest using the power of the web to launch counter-speech. “ When we see harassing behavior, we can speak up to challenge it,” the authors wrote. And that’s true. We can. But if we aren’t white men, it’s likely we won’t be heard.

This Is Not A Drill

The last time I visit Reddit’s offices, a fire drill is underway. As the alarm bleats, bleary-eyed engineers spill out on the sidewalk. I chat with a UX designer named Erica Firment in a flowing skirt, a gray hoodie and a tank top that reads #fempire. I ask her where I can get one, and she alludes to a “secret” group on Facebook for women engineers.

Blount, the former VP of engineering, recruited Firment, and then left before she started. Firment came anyhow. “I use Reddit,” she says, “I believe in Reddit. And it has really interesting problems. Of course I’d want to come here.” Ohanian approaches and asks if we want to join him for a cup of coffee. The bar around the corner, John Colins, hangs out a “Bluebottle” shingle in the mornings and serves up joe. It’s the kind of thing that looks cool in San Francisco but would seem to be trying too hard anywhere else. I agree to come, and he turns to Firment: “Coffee?”

“I can’t,” she says, turning both her pointer fingers to her belly. “I’m pregnant.”

“You’re pregnant?” He asks, which is a surprising question because yes, she is very visually pregnant. And then: “Congratulations!” He offers to buy her a noncaffeinated beverage, and we all amble around the corner.

Ohanian doesn’t have a title right now. When I ask, he says, “It’s kind of vague. It’s still a small company.” He’s still executive board chairman. He’s the designer of Reddit’s alien logo, which he doodled in a notebook margin during a marketing class in college, and all of the avatars employees have. And he’s heading up Reddit’s content efforts. He launched the podcast and the newsletter, and he’s behind a new website, Upvoted, that Reddit is launching this week. The goal is to turn some of the content that bubbles up on Reddit and migrates to Buzzfeed into stories that Reddit itself can publish. It’s a hedge, a product that might be more appealing to advertisers in the short-term than the raucous machine that produces it.

Upvoted is an important project, but it’s also something for Ohanian to own. Because even though Huffman is not in the office today, even though he is somewhere in Europe enjoying a brief vacation, there’s no doubt this is his company to save.

Reddit isn’t out of the woods, but things are looking up. After users dropped off in May when the first of the anti-harassment policies were introduced, they’re picking up again. Reddit has attracted some of the most loyal users on the Web, people (like Firment) who have stuck with the site even when it wasn’t giving them much back. As improbable as it sounds, Altman wonders if leaving Reddit alone for the better part of a decade was, in fact a service to the company. “All the other startups in town had VCs stuffing money down their throats, pushing them to grow faster, and Reddit just didn’t do any of that,” he says. “It just sat there quietly growing organically and got this dedicated user base you wouldn’t have gotten if you were trying to flood it with crappy users.”

In the sometimes short-sighted tech world, where startups grow to a billion users in mere months and $20 million is more likely to be the money you take off the table after venture capitalists invest than the amount for which you sell your company, Reddit is playing the long game. Somewhere in Europe, it’s already evening, and Huffman is replenishing the creative energy that he will need in the weeks and months to come.

Meanwhile, Ohanian emerges from the bar-turned-café with drinks. By the time the slow drip of the drip coffee has filled our cups, the drill is over. The fire, of course, wasn't real. But didn’t we know that? Everyone files back upstairs. There’s work to be done.

1UPDATE 12:45 AM ET 10/06/15: This story has been updated to indicate the correct year Reddit received its investment.

2UPDATE 12:45 AM ET 10/06/15: This story has been updated to correct the number of Reddit employees.

3UPDATE 5:28 PM ET 10/07/15: This story has been updated to state that Ohanian was an advisor to Hipmunk. He was never on the Hipmunk board.