Huffman created Reddit in 2005 with his roommate and college friend, Alexis Ohanian, in a two-bedroom apartment in a suburb of Boston. The site consists of thousands of forums that host varying topics of discussion, from current affairs to video games to question-and-answer sessions with people such as President Barack Obama. It is an online tour de force, with more than 160 million monthly visitors.

Huffman left the day-to-day operations of Reddit in 2009, three years after it was acquired by Advance Publications, and he went on to co-found Hipmunk, an online travel site where he will remain the chief technology officer.

Outspoken users

The challenges Huffman faces at Reddit are numerous. Since the site's inception, every chief executive of the company has faced sharp criticism from users.

"Reddit's definitely a lot more fun when you're not running the place," Yishan Wong, Reddit's former chief executive, who preceded Pao, wrote in a post on the site on Saturday.

At least Huffman, 31, will probably not face the same type of invective over race and gender that was regularly leveled at Pao. She was also regularly accused of failing to communicate with the site's user base, as were many other employees. She had acknowledged earlier this month that Reddit managers had a history of broken promises and poor communication, and that users had lost trust in her and other administrators of the site.

The exit of Taylor, who joined Reddit in 2013 as director of communications and talent and later collaborated closely with users for the site's "ask me anything" section, was a breaking point for Reddit moderators because she was a main intermediary between the company's employees and the site's volunteers. While the exact circumstances of Taylor's departure remain unclear, her dismissal increased concerns among Reddit moderators that executives cared little about keeping the community informed.

"We all had the rug ripped out from under us and feel betrayed," Karmanaut, a Reddit moderator who worked regularly with Taylor, wrote in a Reddit post last week. "Before doing that, the admins really should have at least talked to us."


On Saturday in a Reddit post, Huffman said that improving relations with the community was a top goal, and that he planned to hold regular "ask me anything" question-and-answer sessions on the site.

Reddit had also languished in talent and technology, with little money for expansion. It was only in the last few years that Reddit was spun off from Advance, and raised two separate rounds of venture capital that it could use to grow.

In the interview on Friday, Huffman acknowledged that the many unpaid volunteers who control the site had not been given the proper software tools to help expand and moderate their communities. And despite seeing a surge in traffic from smartphone users, the company has done little to improve its mobile Web and app offerings.

"It hasn't really changed in nearly 10 years," he said. "It's just this incredible platform, but there are a lot of technology issues holding it back."

Policy problems

Huffman also must be deft in navigating how he will shape Reddit's policies on what can be posted to the site. The issue was a contentious one that Pao and Wong, her predecessor, regularly came under fire for during their respective tenures.

Pao stumbled with the content policy in May, when the company decided to explicitly prohibit harassment on the site or using its forums to organise harassment. As a result of that change, Reddit banned five communities, or subreddits, on the site, including one dedicated to the ridicule of overweight people. For some, those changes were perceived as a form of censorship and the prohibition of free expression, contravening two pillars upon which Reddit was founded.

Huffman has not said whether Reddit will uphold its current content policies. But presenting his stance on what the policies should be is another top priority, he said.


"We will make it very clear what is and is not acceptable behaviour on Reddit," Huffman wrote in the Reddit post on Saturday. At least some of that, he said, will very likely include prohibiting illegal activity or posts that would cause harm or fear for one's well-being.

Huffman will also be faced with improving the morale of Reddit's battered staff, which numbers about 70. For most of this year, staff members have grappled with a loudly dissatisfied user base and, in some cases, witnessed their wrath.

"The Reddit team has been through a lot the past while," Huffman wrote in his Reddit post. "I hope I can bring some stability."

The New York Times