Returning Reddit Co-Founder Walks a Tightrope as He Acts to Change the Rules

The return of a founder to a company is a well-worn story line in Silicon Valley.

In Apple's darkest hour, Steve Jobs came back, eventually turning the computer maker into the world's most valuable corporation. In April, Mark Pincus stepped back into the chief executive role at Zynga. And Jack Dorsey, a co-founder of Twitter, has twice returned to help right the social media company's ship.

Now Steve Huffman, who co-founded Reddit in 2005, may have one of the toughest returns of all. After being away for several years, Huffman reappeared last Friday as chief executive to pull off a turnaround of the online message board, which has grappled with a series of missteps and is embroiled in a battle to win back the confidence of its users.

On Thursday, Huffman made his first moves toward that end. The company, based in San Francisco, proposed a new content policy for the site that would effectively ban spam, illegal activity and harassment, as well as the posting of "private or confidential information" and sexual content involving minors.

The proposals would also label certain types of adult content posted to Reddit as not safe for work, or NSFW, including pornography and content that "violates a common sense of decency." Gaining access to that content on Reddit would require a user to log on to the site and opt in to see it. The content would not appear in search results and, Huffman said, would not generate revenue for Reddit.

"I've gotten the increasingly strong feeling that Reddit needs me more than ever," Huffman said in an interview Thursday. "We have an opportunity to be this massive force of good in the world."

The proposals are not set in stone, and Reddit will take suggestions on changes from its community of users, who are known as Redditors. But the moves risk alienating the new chief executive from the community he helped create a decade ago out of a two-bedroom apartment in a Boston suburb, potentially driving users to find another site to post any and every type of content they want.

Reddit, one of the Internet's most visited websites, with 170 million regular monthly users, has traditionally been a kind of repository for all sorts of content and discussion, as varied as adorable cat photos or violent pornography and question-and-answer sessions with President Barack Obama. The site still resembles a retro message board, with long threads of text and few visuals.

But as the site has grown, Huffman said, Reddit's views on what sort of content should - and should not - be allowed have evolved.

"We cannot turn a blind eye to it like we have in the past," he said. "Our responsibility is to our community so they can express themselves on Reddit."

Other leaders of Reddit, including former chief executives Ellen Pao and Yishan Wong, as well as co-founder Alexis Ohanian, have previously tried to clamp down on some of the noxious content on the site - only to be met with widespread backlash from the Reddit community. Those in Reddit's hard-core user base define themselves as defenders of free speech and adversaries of censorship, and have historically reacted negatively to any new proposals that would prevent that.

Immediate reactions by Redditors to Huffman's proposed changes were mixed on Thursday. Some said the policy would impose unduly harsh restrictions on discourse, to the detriment of the community. "We need opposing views," one user, Massachoosite, wrote in a Reddit post. "We need people whose stupidity clashes against our values."

Huffman is walking into Reddit at a crisis moment. Pao resigned last week after a wave of criticism from Redditors over the sudden dismissal of a well-liked Reddit employee who had been a liaison between the company and the community. Prominent staff members have departed and the community is wary of any drastic changes that might made by management.

"How much has the culture changed while you're away," Mike Kwatinetz, an investor with Azure Capital Partners, said of the challenges Huffman faces.

There are analogies to Jobs' return to Apple in 1997, when the company was in financial disarray and losing ground to Microsoft, whose Windows 95 software was selling rapidly. Jobs returned as interim chief and immediately began making changes, including cutting failed projects like the Newton device and revamping licensing models for the company's software.

"He came back and was fearless," said John Lilly, a venture capitalist at Greylock Partners who worked as a computer scientist at Apple when Jobs returned. "Crucially, he didn't assume that the company he'd left was the company he was returning to. He didn't make assumptions about what was there. He just figured out what he wanted to build and used the tools around him."

Huffman, who left day-to-day operations at Reddit in 2009, spent his years away engaged in entrepreneurial activities, including co-founding Hipmunk, an online travel site where he will remain the chief technology officer.

Like Jobs and Dorsey at Twitter, Huffman now comes back to a vastly larger company - Reddit averaged 12 million monthly active users in 2010 - and he faces a different set of issues than he did in the online message board's early years. Reddit was acquired by Advance Publications, parent company of Conde Nast, in 2006. For years it operated on a shoestring budget with few employees and little support from its parent company.

In 2011, Advance spun off the site to let Reddit grow. Reddit subsequently raised more than $50 million in venture capital, and is focusing on developing its user base far beyond the tens of millions who visit the site today. The company has more than 70 employees compared with the handful when Huffman was there previously.

Eventually, Reddit must also figure out how to generate more revenue, which traditionally the company has done primarily through advertising. The ad landscape has shifted with enormous leaps in technology in the last five years, including the rise of programmatic ads. And while Facebook and Twitter are more prohibitive of what is posted to their networks, some of Reddit's more objectionable content could scare off potential advertisers.

"To attract more mainstream audiences and bring in the big-budget advertisers, you must hide or remove the ugly," Pao wrote in an opinion piece in The Washington Post on Thursday. "No one has figured out the best place to draw the line between bad and ugly - or whether that line can support a viable business model."

For now, Huffman said he is not immediately focused on making money. He wants to increase the site's user base at an even faster clip, and to do that, he said, he wants Reddit to be the best place for engaging in "open and authentic conversation on the Internet."

"I want the world to be proud of Reddit," Huffman said.