‘Made Recruiting Here More Difficult’

New Reddit CEO and cofounder Steve Huffman, on the policy changes announced today that include banning the utterly racist “CoonTown” sub-reddit:

We didn’t ban them for being racist. We banned them because we have to spend a disproportionate amount of time dealing with them. If we want to improve Reddit, we need more people, but CT’s existence and popularity has also made recruiting here more difficult.

If they didn’t ban them for being racist — for god’s sake their name was offensively racist — but because they forced Reddit “to spend a disproportionate amount of time dealing with them”, well, I don’t know that that’s going to change Reddit’s recruiting problems. The message seems to be that they’ll host racist/sexist/whatever communities, just not troublemaking racist/sexist/whatever communities.

★ Wednesday, 5 August 2015