Reddit grows up on its way to an IPO
Nicolás Rivero, 17 April 2021
Reddit has traditionally taken a laissez-faire approach to policing content on its platform. The company hosts a loose federation of old-school internet forums, known as subreddits, which are each overseen by a team of volunteer moderators. Reddit sets certain baseline rules banning things like child porn, drug sales, and (as of 2015) harassment. But the rest is up to the users in each subreddit, who set their own community-specific norms and empower unpaid moderators to enforce them.
This is a starkly different moderation approach from Facebook and Twitter, which each set clear, granular, top-down rules in their terms of service and employ armies of contract workers and far-reaching algorithms to weed out noxious content. Reddit’s decentralized policy has become a liability in recent years, and may become even more of a drag as the company eyes an IPO. (Reddit recently hired Drew Vollero, who helped Snapchat go public in 2017, as its first-ever CFO to help prepare for the company’s debut on the stock market.)
Slowly but surely, Reddit has begun exerting more control over content, in lockstep with efforts to burnish its revenue figures and make its business model look more like its dominant social media peers. But that hasn’t been easy. Reddit users have gone into full-on revolt over policy decisions they disagree with. At various points, the powerful moderators of the site’s most popular subreddits have locked their forums in protest, effectively taking large portions of the site offline.
