Reddit is all about free speech. Or maybe it's not about free speech. Or maybe nobody knows what Reddit is about. Or maybe nobody knows what free speech is about. Reddit's management doesn't seem sure, and it's threatening to tear the site apart.

Yesterday, Reddit's incoming CEO and original co-founder Steve Huffman said he'd be holding a Q&A session over the site's content policy. Reddit is famously expansive in what it allows, but it's taken a very mild stand against harassment in the past months, which has created a firestorm over whether or not Reddit is truly in favor of free speech.

Huffman answered the central question bluntly in his announcement. "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," he wrote. To some extent, this should be completely obvious — just look at Reddit's taboo against revealing non-protected personal information, which is absolutely legal. But it also doesn't quite square with how the site has portrayed itself in the past few years.

So has Reddit historically been about free speech? Yes, and no.

July 2015: "If there was anything racist, sexist, or homophobic I'd ban it right away."

In the wake of Ellen Pao's firing, former CEO Yishan Wong agrees that Reddit wasn't started as a "bastion of free speech," even if it would get closer to one over the years. Specifically, he recalls asking Huffman for advice when surreptitious "creepshots" of women were coming under fire.

The very interesting thing he wrote back was "back when I was running things, if there was anything racist, sexist, or homophobic I'd ban it right away. I don't think there's a place for such things on Reddit. Of course, now that Reddit is much bigger, I understand if maybe things are different." [...] The free speech policy was something I formalized because it seemed like the wiser course at the time. It's worth stating that in that era, we were talking about whether it was ok for people to post creepy pictures of women taken legally in public. That's shitty, but it's a far cry from the extremes of hate that some parts of the site host today.

Wong says he didn't anticipate how far the needle would shift over the years: "Reddit has become a lot bigger — yes, a lot better — AND a lot worse. I have to take responsibility."

June 2015: "It's not our site's goal to be a completely free-speech platform."

After banning five subreddits for harassment, interim CEO Ellen Pao justifies her plan on, among other platforms, NPR. Her statement sounds a lot like Huffman's.

Somebody expressing ideas that aren't consistent with everybody's views is something that we encourage. There are certain posts that do make people feel unsafe, that people feel threatened or they feel that their family or friends or people near them are going to be unsafe, and those are the specific things that we are focused on today. It's not our site's goal to be a completely free speech platform. We want to be a safe platform and we want to be a platform that also protects privacy at the same time.

The decision isn't popular on Reddit, and Pao steps down a month later, after unrelated protests about the firing of a Reddit employee.

May 2015: "Reddit should be a place where anyone can pull up their soapbox and speak their mind ... but right now Redditors are telling us they sometimes encounter users who use the system to harass them."

Defending a newly instituted anti-harassment policy, co-founder Alexis Ohanian gives Redditors a tidbit of information about the site's founding: it was inspired by London public forum Speakers' Corner. He promotes an open community, but one that people can use without feeling unsafe.

Reddit should be a place where anyone can pull up their soapbox and speak their mind, or have a discussion and maybe learn something new and even challenging or uncomfortable, but right now Redditors are telling us they sometimes encounter users who use the system to harass them and that's a problem.

This is predictably mocked by Redditors: "The internet has never been a 'nice and friendly' place," sneers the top-rated reply.

September 2014: "We uphold the ideal of free speech on Reddit as much as possible."

After a week of criticism, Reddit shuts down "The Fappening," a subreddit dedicated to spreading and organizing leaked nude pictures of celebrities like Jennifer Lawrence. CEO Yishan Wong promises that this won't become a regular occurrence, saying that Reddit is "the government of a new type of community" and making a strident defense of the ability to post just about anything.

We uphold the ideal of free speech on reddit as much as possible not because we are legally bound to, but because we believe that you — the user — has the right to choose between right and wrong, good and evil, and that it is your responsibility to do so. When you know something is right, you should choose to do it. But as much as possible, we will not force you to do it.

October 2012: "We stand for free speech."

Gawker journalist Adrian Chen exposes the real name of Violentacrez, the man behind some of Reddit's creepiest boards. Large parts of Reddit respond by blacklisting all Gawker links, arguing that Chen has violated Reddit's "no personal information" rule. In a memo leaked by Gawker, Yishan Wong tells staff that "this ban on links from the Gawker network is not making Reddit look so good."

We stand for free speech. This means we are not going to ban distasteful subreddits. We will not ban legal content even if we find it odious or if we personally condemn it. Not because that's the law in the United States — because as many people have pointed out, privately-owned forums are under no obligation to uphold it — but because we believe in that ideal independently, and that's what we want to promote on our platform. We are clarifying that now because in the past it wasn't clear, and (to be honest) in the past we were not completely independent and there were other pressures acting on Reddit. Now it's just Reddit, and we serve the community, we serve the ideals of free speech, and we hope to ultimately be a universal platform for human discourse.

February 2012: "I would love to imagine that Common Sense would have been a self-post on Reddit, by Thomas Paine."

Ohanian talks to Forbes about the future of politics and Reddit's recent blackout protest against SOPA — it's widely credited with helping kill the widely loathed anti-piracy bill. He's asked what the Founding Fathers would think about his site.

"A bastion of free speech on the World Wide Web? I bet they would like it," he replies. It's the digital form of political pamphlets. "Yes, with much wider distribution and without the inky fingers," he says. "I would love to imagine that Common Sense would have been a self-post on Reddit, by Thomas Paine, or actually a Redditor named T_Paine."

July 2011: "We're a free speech site with very few exceptions."

Reddit general manager Erik Martin appears on Ask Me Anything. "What do you think about subreddits such as r/jailbait and r/picsofdeadkids?" a user asks. Martin says he finds them "gross" and imagines 98 percent of Reddit might agree, but questions where you'd draw the line with something like "Pics of Dead Kids."

What if the name of the subreddit was /r/autopsyphotos or /r/doyoureallywanttogointocriminalforensics and they were sincere in their discussion of these images? Would some of that 98 percent now be ok with it? I would bet at least some would. What if it wasn't kids but adults? Or historical autopsy photos only? The point is I don't want to be the one making those decisions for anyone but myself, and it's not the business Reddit is in. We're a free speech site with very few exceptions (mostly personal info) and having to stomach occasional troll reddit like picsofdeadkids or morally questionable reddits like jailbait are part of the price of free speech on a site like this.

May 2011: "Posting personal information is the internet version of vandalism."

As Reddit grows, the site's administrators realize that its user base can descend on random individuals like a swarm of angry bees. This can be perfectly legal speech, but community manager Kristine Fasnacht says that the site is cracking down hard on posting information that could lead to harassment. This will remain one of Reddit's few sacrosanct rules in the coming years.

DO NOT POST USERS' PERSONAL INFORMATION. EVER. NO phone numbers, NO email addresses, NO real names, NO blood types, NO SSN's, NO facebook pics or profiles, NO mothers' maiden names, NOTHING. This is a ban-on-sight offense, and lately we have banned multiple users for posting personal info. [...] Posting personal information is the Internet version of vandalism and abuse and will not be tolerated.

March 2008: "We're just taking ourselves out of the equation."

Reddit starts letting people create their own subreddits. That's right — for three years, Reddit handled all its own community creation, with input from users. Ohanian outlines new classes of public, "restricted," and private groups, which are at that point just called "reddits."

We learned a long time ago that there are things you all as a community can do that we — as a team of five — couldn't possibly do. Creating different verticals for reddit is just one more area where we know our community can do a better job identifying and growing successful reddits. Our first new community, programming.reddit was created because users explicitly told us they wanted a place for users interested in programming to share links and discussion. Now we're just taking ourselves out of the equation.

December 2005: "Comments!"

Reddit didn't launch with a commenting system, either — one of the key elements of its "free speech" platform. These were opened up a few months after launch, with a short announcement post by Huffman.

We added a commenting system today for your enjoyment. The comments are votable and can be sorted just as all the other links on Reddit.

June 2005: The beginning

Reddit was founded in June 2005, and Huffman posted its first substantive blog update in October. And the first order of business wasn't community or free speech so much as figuring out how to be the best aggregation site on the web.

We'd like to make [it] easier to share links with other users on Reddit, as well as with friends who are not members. We're also working to make it easier to avoid submitting duplicate stories.

Sometimes Reddit is a bastion of free speech, sometimes it isn't, and sometimes it doesn't seem to matter. That's what makes this debate so tricky. If there's no "original" version to rely on, the community will have to decide what Reddit should be, not just figure out how to return it to an earlier, unsullied state. And it will have to do it while trying to become a real, profitable business — not just a tiny experiment.