Steve Huffman

When you strip away all the incentives of social media, we see that people just want to be helpful and interesting and funny, which is a very different perspective than I think one might get if their view of humanity is through the lens of social media.

we see that self-governance works amazingly well.

What we say at Reddit is the only thing that scales with people is people.

So all of our communities, they write their own rules on Reddit.

Far and away, the most common rule within Reddit communities is some form of be civil.

AI doesn't have values.

Well, actually, it does, but those values are programmed in.

And I think it's worth considering who did the programming.

And finally, one of the biggest misconceptions, Reddit is mostly anonymous.

People think mostly anonymous, that must lead to bad behavior.

No.

The context and the incentives lead to good or bad behavior.

People being anonymous actually is safety.

It gives people the freedom to be themselves and say what they really think.

What we've learned about cities is that cities are organic organisms.

They're living organisms created by their citizens.

Everything interesting about the city that we're in was created by the people who live here, as is everything that was interesting on Reddit was created by its users.

We didn't design it.

It emerged.

That's what you get when you let people be people.