Reddit

Reddit CEO and co-founder Steve Huffman has taken to the social network to apologise for editing posts criticising himself in pro-Trump subreddit r/the_donald.

In a lengthy post on the TIFU (Today I Fucked Up) subreddit, Huffman apologised for his attempt to "troll the trolls". Huffman called his post "TIFU by editing some comments and creating unnecessary controversy."


"I am sorry: I am sorry for compromising the trust you all have in Reddit, and I am sorry to those that I created work and stress for, particularly over the holidays. It is heartbreaking to think that my actions distracted people from their family over the holiday; instigated harassment of our moderators; and may have harmed Reddit itself, which I love more than just about anything," Huffman posted.

"More than anything, I want Reddit to heal, and I want our country to heal, and although many of you have asked us to ban the r/the_donald outright, it is with this spirit of healing that I have resisted doing so."

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In response to Huffman's post, former Reddit CEO Ellen Pao weighed in on the thread with her own criticisms of the current CEO. "I would have immediately fired anyone who did [what Huffman did]," Pao wrote.


Adding a postscript to his apology, Huffman slipped in a change to Reddit that should cut down on the visibility of abusive posts and trolling on the website. Reddit users can now filter out specific subreddits from the r/all page.

Usually, r/all displays the top ranking posts from across every subreddit regardless of which ones a user subscribes to. Now reddit users can chose to exclude certain subreddits from that page. In a video accompanying his post, Huffman demonstrated that users can now filter out posts from controversial subreddit r/the_donald, stopping them from appearing on their personal r/all page.

Redditors were not happy last month when Huffman admitted to editing comments and "trolling" others on the website.


Huffman changed abusive posts about him to mention the moderators of a pro-Donald Trump subreddit. "I messed with the “fuck u/spez ” comments, replacing "spez" with r/the_donald mods for about an hour," he said in response to a post about being caught out.

"As the CEO, I shouldn’t play such games, and it’s all fixed now," Huffman said. "Our community team is pretty pissed at me, so I most assuredly won’t do this again." In a separate reply, he said: "This was a case of me trolling the trolls for a bit."

Trying to explain the editing, the CEO argued it had been "a long week" following the site's move to tackle a problem with fake news. Citing problems with users posting personal information, Reddit banned the r/pizzagate subreddit. The Pizzagate scandal falsely claimed Hillary Clinton kidnapped, molested, and trafficked children in the backrooms of a Washington, DC, pizza restaurant.