Endless Thread - Dirty 6th

Episode Date: March 15, 2018

Excerpts from Amory and Ben's live AMA at SXSW, plus their conversation with Reddit CEO Steve Huffman.

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Amory. Ben. Where are we? Who are we? What are we doing here? What is life even? We're in Austin, Texas. Right.

Check. Check. Check. That's right. We're standing right near a Caesar Chavez Street in East Austin. And we're kind of here in, in Texas, in Austin, Texas, just grabbing some interviews, hanging out. But that doesn't mean we don't have some sweet, sweet podcast content for you. That's right. We did an AMA yesterday at Reddit's kind of

headquarters while they're here at South by Southwest at a place called the Belmont. And we did that with their head of entertainment. Her name is Ashley Dawkins. And she was up on stage asking us the questions that Redditors were asking us online. All right. So we're going to take you away from Caesar Chavez and these sick jams in East Austin and take you to that AMA and we've got some other stuff too so stick with us. Here we go. Okay. Our next question is from Colonel Mustard.

He wants to know what's something surprising you discovered throughout the production of the podcast. Ooh. Not yourself. What's about the users? Both? Good. It's a very, I want to really think about that. I won't think about it at all.

I'll just say, I'll just say like, you know, something that's been surprising and amazing for me is just both like how many different kinds of real people there are on Reddit and how many different communities there are and how vibrant those communities can be. You know, it's just been amazing to me throughout the process, like finding Redditors who are like super interesting have very interesting different personal experiences

and are willing to share them. Yeah, I mean, I can't say that this is surprising, but I don't think that I could have fully comprehended the scope of the kinds of stories that we would be talking about. I mean, if you are just a straight-up reporter and you have a beat, you have a sense of the kinds of stories you're going to encounter and, you know, the different kinds of people you'll meet and perspectives you'll hear.

But when your beat is Reddit, which is, you know, the internet, which is society. Pretty big beat. We are, you know, we're talking about driving hundreds of miles tomorrow to talk about soil samples as one story. And then we have a story like we just focused on one person's struggle with heroin. It is such a welcome education for me along the way. Yeah. Okay. This question is from Q1.

Have you had really awkward times meeting redditors in person? We can be shy, awkward. Many of us are even afraid of doxing. How much coaxing if you had to do to get in-person interview adventure subjects to come out of their shelves and work with you? Oh, that's a great question. Well, the first thing that comes to mind is a phrase that I have used with people when reaching out and that I genuinely mean is that I want to hear as much or as little as you're willing to share.

And I think I'm very sympathetic to the fact that not everyone wants to pour their heart out to me, and that's okay. I have to earn that from them anyways. So if they'll tell me a little bit, great. And if not, that's okay. And one of the things, too, that I think we take more seriously, I mean, this is one of the things I think we take the most seriously when talking about. to people is protecting their anonymity if they want it.

And that's a journalism thing. It's not even necessarily an endless thread thing. And specifically on Reddit, like as Amory said, I think we're really careful about saying to people like, look, if you don't want your name used, I think even offered people trying to actually change their voice. You know, like one of those, like, you can have someone else read their lines. Yeah.

That is, that has been done. Yeah. We will do it if that's really a concern. Okay. Well, thank you guys so much for this and for all that you do for us and the users. We appreciate it so much. And let's get a beer, please. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Thanks, Ashley. Thank you. At Radio Lab, we love nothing more than nerding out about science, neuroscience, chemistry. But, but we do also like to get into other. kinds of stories. Stories about policing or politics. Country music. Hockey. Sex. Of bugs. Regardless of whether we're looking at science or not science, we bring a rigorous curiosity to get you

the answers. And hopefully make you see the world anew. Radio Lab, adventures on the edge of what we think we know. Wherever you get your podcast. Oh, yeah? Yeah, we're ready. Hello. Hello. How are you doing? How are you doing? Pretty good. How are you? I'm doing just well. I'm just doing just well. What are you doing? So I'm walking to a happy hour as we speak. As you can see, I'm very happy.

Yeah, you seem happy. These are my friends, Zach. This is Isabel? Is this completely off? What's your name? My name's E.K. Who are you guys with? You're not like live on the air, don't we're rolling.

We make a podcast about Reddit. Really? I love Reddit. I do, yes. I actually look through it on my lunch break and just kind of get a laugh and relax. Yeah, he actually did tell me about it. I didn't know how popular and, like, crazy it was. I mean, over the years, it's got a lot more popular than that you expected.

It's like a lot of Reddit memes and information comes across, like, Twitter and Instagram. What about you, EK? Do you use Reddit? Man, you know, the times that I've actually used Reddit was to find out some information about some coding, believe it or not. I feel like a lot of people that use that website like that stuff. Awesome. Thank you. Thank you so much, guys. Yeah.

Have a fun night. Yeah, have a good time with the happy hour. Bye. Emery. Ben. Sign sealed delivered. Where are we? We're on 6th Street.

Sixth in Congress. Yeah, this is like one of the busiest places in Austin right now. It's a very busy intersection. You guys just heard some of us talking about how we make the show, but the show is Not over. Today's show is not over. We're surrounded by cars, motorcycles, people walking around, and this petty cab driver, which is, you know, he's riding a bicycle and he's got a major, yeah, playing some soul. He's got a major boombox in his bicycle cab. Which, you know, you want when you're pulling people around.

That's right. Keep them moving. Yeah. And speaking of keeping them moving. a moving. We're going to take you to... We got more to the show. So we're going to take you to the next spot, which will be, again, inside and much quieter. But we just wanted to give you a taste of Austin. What are we going to next? We're going to Steve Huffman. He's the CEO of Reddit. We had a chance to sit down with him yesterday at Reddit's kind of home base, again, that was the Belmont. So we're going to play you a little bit of that conversation. And I think the first thing I asked

when we sat down was, how do you Reddit? So I do probably 95% of my Rediting these days in the app. And so I start off in bed. The first thing I do is open R-all. And I don't usually browse R-all, but I open this to see, am I in trouble? You know, what is going? There's just something going on today that, like,

is going to make my day hard or not. Emergency check. Yeah. And so just to make sure what's the top of our all. And if I see it's something like derpy, I'm just like, that's like a nice relief. Then I'll go to my home feed. I'm subscribed to probably 200 communities or so. And then I just, you know, start digging in.

Cool. Can you talk about a few of your favorite posts of all time? Sure. There's one. I don't know if you guys are doing this one. The Banana for Scale origin. Oh. We haven't done this one yet, but this is.

Okay. This guy posts, he's like, hey, Reddit, I found this, like, hole in my wall, and there are these things in there. And it was, like, candy wrappers and stuff. And he's like, I've put a banana in the picture for scale. And there's, like, this whole discussion about it. And so people are joking, like, a banana for scale? Like, what? Why?

And then somebody else was like, hey, man, the banana thing's cool. But are we all just going to ignore the fact that this guy has a person living in his wall? because there was like a garbage like a sleeping bag and trash and stuff in this guy's like wall and so it was just this like I don't know and that becomes a thing

this is what's so interesting part of the thing that I love about Reddit as a user is that these things become part of the lexicon of Redditors right? And now Banana is the standard unit of measurement. Yeah which is amazing this does

seem to be like a really interesting time for large platforms when it comes to figuring out policy and being reactive to policy and how to be reactive quickly but also very carefully. You know, how do you think more generally about the process of banning users, banning subreddits, banning content, and how that butts up against ideas about freedom of speech and, you know, keeping the platform vibrant. So on Reddit, what's really important is that it's, It's the most human place on the internet. We want people to be authentic and genuine and share themselves in every way possible. And sometimes they do so in ways that it might be offensive or not welcome by the larger community.

And that's generally okay. We care very much about the, we try to separate behavior from beliefs. So we want Reddit to be a space where you can have your beliefs. And we believe that that is what the freedom of speech in the United States protects, is the ability to have beliefs and ask difficult questions and have political debate that might be uncomfortable. But it's your behaviors that are really important. So just like in the United States where you can't yell fire

in a crowd of theater, right? You can't falsely advertise, libel and slander, right? You can't do those things legally. On Reddit, we have boundaries as well, right? There's no harassing or bullying, nothing illegal, no involuntary sexualization. no glorifying violence. And so we've tried to draw those lines.

And so that still leaves a pretty, like, wide area within the, to speak. And our thinking on this issue does evolve over time. Yeah, and it's tricky, right? Because you have users who are consistently giving you feedback. And I was reading the post that you made recently on this topic of deep fakes and sort of how you guys were approaching policy and it also had to do with, I think, some of the conversation around Russian interference

with the election, things like that. How do you sort of take the feedback from users that are saying, you know, you're not moving fast enough on this? Or what about this subreddit that's offensive to you or offensive to us? Like, I guess how do you think about taking that feedback but also proceeding carefully?

I mean, you just said it. We take the feedback, but we proceed carefully. The last thing we want to do is be reactionary. And so in order for us to ban a community or say, you can't say this, that takes a lot of thought. And we want to make sure that we're doing something that we can enforce forever going forward, that we can do it consistently and fairly. It can be difficult because our community does have strong feelings on this. And we live in a time where the debate is very emotional.

And you see that on both sides. We've got it all. The left, the right, and everything in between. And our job is to make sure that the left, the right, and everybody in between has their say. Let's talk redesign. Yes. When I talk to people who don't know a lot about Reddit, I often get these responses like, it looks weird.

I don't understand it. Things like this. Can you talk a little bit about the current design now and how you explain the design to people, commenting, threading, stuff like that? Like if someone came to you and was like, like, I don't get it. How would you describe the design to them? Well, the early days of Reddit, Reddit was all outbound links.

And so a list of blue links made sense. And our product strategy was, okay, no categorization. We don't need to explain it. There's not going to be an onboarding process. We're not going to require you to log in. We're just going to assault you with content. We're going to give you so much content that there's something there. And it's going to be dense and it's going to be above the fold.

and we're going to guarantee that there's something there that is interesting to you. And that actually worked for a long time. And especially with our user base who I think is comfortable taking a chance, right? Just, yep, I'm here. I don't need to understand why I'm just going to click on things. And it still works, right? It really does. Well, yes and no.

Right. Hence redesign. We see about a million new users a day. Wow. Have never been to Reddit before. That is our most conservative, like we've chopped out incognito, in duplicates, and then chopped it in half again. A million new people a day. That's amazing.

That is a lot of shots on goal. Most of those shots are not going in. Yeah, I was going to ask, what's the bounce rate? Yeah, we probably alienate about 990,000 users a day. Fair. So I think there's a lot of opportunity for improvement. And the content of Reddit has changed. Yeah.

Right? In the early days, 100% outbound links. Now the content is 60% self-posts, and the vast majority of the rest are images and video, which are native to Reddit now as well. As goes the Internet. As goes the Internet. So really in the redesign,

we want our presentation of that content to match the type of content. You know, we're two white men talking to each other, and I think another thing that a lot of people assume about Reddit is that it's just people like us talking to each other. How do you think about inclusion and encouraging inclusion and what would you say to people who make that assumption? Well, the beauty of Reddit is in the breadth of Reddit. That's how we've grown. So you can't have hundreds of millions of users without having a cross-section of humanity. And when we talk about

bringing Reddit to everybody on the planet, to having billions of users, then you're really intersecting the whole planet. And so we want to see diversity in our communities, which means we need to have diversity on our user base, which means we need to have diversity at our company. I think all of these things tie together. And it's in that diversity that the coming together of different perspectives and the creation of empathy that is the engine of Reddit. That's what Reddit does. It's just like this empathy engine. And you get that through diversity. So our origin, yeah, was tech people, right? Tech people who would put up with Reddit's UI, which is demographically narrowing. And that's one of the things I'm excited about

in the redesign. For example, the gender breakdown on the phone is much better than it is on the web, even though the content is the same. And, you know, I'm sure we could debate reasons for why are why or why not, but that is the fact. And I'm hoping when we get through the redesign and we make the UI more accessible and welcoming that we'll see that reflected in increased diversity in our user base as well. Can you give me some Steve Huffman today I learned? Like a lot of people know a lot about you just in terms of your behavior on Reddit and stuff like that.

I once, I was in a bar, you know, urinating, looking at my phone. and I dropped it into the urinal. And I sat there and had this moment, right? It was definitely like, what's the community called? Today I fucked up. No, no, watch them die inside. Oh, yeah. Watching people die inside.

Well, watching people die inside. Yeah. And so I just sat there looking at my phone, wondering, am I going to pick this thing up? Right? And I was like, okay, so if I pick it up, then I'm going to have to wash it. Like, can I wash it?

And I just, I just, I left it is what I did. Oh, you left it? I came out and I told my friends, I need a new phone. It's in there, but I just, I can't go through this. You just literally left it in the urinal. Yeah. That's a good today I learned. That's a very good day I learned.

So, careful. I always now, I just hold it to the side. So in case I drop it, it's going to hit my shoe. Steve, thanks a lot for talking with us. Thank you. No, it's been my pleasure, really. There is something powerful about the sound of the human voice. Beautifully produced audio has the unique power to connect and inspire.

Tell your organization's story with a custom podcast from City Space Productions, the Creative Studio from WBUR's Business Partnerships team. Become a thought leader. Recruit new talent. Reach new audiences. Whatever your goal, we can help. Discover how the magic is made at WBUR.org slash creative studio. All right, Amory.

All right, Ben. I think this is our last stop. Yeah, Dirty Sixth. Dirty Sixth, aka Sixth Street. Mm-hmm. It's like 1130 at night. Yeah, it's not fully crazy yet, but it's pretty crazy. There's no cars.

There's lots of people. Some people with their shirts off. And this is it. We're done. For now. We're wrapping up our South by Southwest 2018 experience, and we'll be back to our regular programming next week. Yeah, so I think I think I'm going to do the credits.

You ready? Please do. Right in the middle of 6th Street. Yeah. All right. Endless Threat is a production of WBUR, Boston's NPR station, in partnership with Reddit. Our show is a dream realized by Jessica Alpert, who, when we ask if she likes the episode we put together, she sometimes says, W.T.F.

Iris Adler is our executive producer, and she makes sure our stories meet the bar of. Mildly interesting. Mixed in sound design by John Parati and Paul Vikas, who will remind us when ever recording in the field like this, that... Nature is... Nick. Our web producer is Megan Kelly, who looks at our attempts at writing web copy and goes...

Aw. Our intern is Chris Eulian, who, when we put him on a task, he politely says... Hold my beer. Our theme music is by squelcher. We like to use Redditor Art for our episodes, though this week is just a picture of me and Emery on our South by Southwest Adventures.

If you are a Redditor and you'd like to make a piece of art for an upcoming episode, you can give us a holler. You can find us at WBUR.org. slash endless thread. We are also on Reddit. Endless underscore thread is our username. This show was produced by Josh Swartz. Endless Threads, Amory Sewardson, and me, senior producer and host. I'm Ben Brock Johnson.

And I'll let myself out, aka Finish Walking Dirty Sixth. Thank you. Amory. Ben. We are at the Chili's at 45th in Lamar in Austin, Texas. Like no place else or whatever the sign said when we first walked in. Like no place else. And this is where when we asked our Austin, the Austin subreddit,

when we said, where should we go? They said the Chili's at 45th in Lamar get the skill of case out. That's right. Asked, answered, and now delivered. One might think that that wouldn't be the place where you would get the best food in Austin, But that's what the Redditors on R-Slaught Austin told us to do, so that's why we're here. And we listen to them. And they said specifically the skillet queso is what you need to get.

And it's only 1130 a.m., so it's a perfect time for queso. There's no wrong time for queso.