Reddit CEO Steve Huffman sat down with Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong at Coinbase's San Francisco office. They talked about the moderation practices on /r/Bitcoin, whether Reddit should remove subreddit
Reddit CEO Steve Huffman sat down with Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong at Coinbase's San Francisco office. They talked about the moderation practices on /r/Bitcoin, whether Reddit should remove subreddit moderators, and whether the platform might adopt Bitcoin someday.
The issue is the subreddit itself. For years, disagreement over Bitcoin's future has split the community. Mike Hearn's Bitcoin XT proposed a hard fork to increase the block size limit. Moderators removed posts and comments about Bitcoin XT from /r/Bitcoin. Some called it censorship. The subreddit's policy stated: "Promotion of client software which attempts to alter the Bitcoin protocol without overwhelming consensus is not permitted." Others said the moderators had the right to shape the community.
Roger Ver and others created /r/btc as an alternative. Armstrong preferred the second subreddit. In late 2015, moderators removed a tweet Armstrong posted about Coinbase testing Bitcoin XT. A month before that, he had tweeted that he was leaving /r/Bitcoin for /r/btc, citing censorship.
"We've emailed about this once or twice, but there's a lot of censorship happening," Armstrong told Huffman.
Armstrong brought up Theymos, /r/Bitcoin's lead moderator: "His username is Theymos. If you want to ban him."
Huffman acknowledged that Reddit had never thought through what happens when subreddit moderators act against the platform's openness. "The moderator hierarchy situation is one of them," he said of decisions Reddit made years ago without considering long-term effects. "We've seen that with the Bitcoin community."
He added: "I don't disagree with you at all. Right now, our opinion is that we try to stay hands-off unless they're breaking other, site-wide rules. That said, we have put a lot of thought into these issues. What is the best way to appoint new moderators and remove old ones in a way that the communities can do themselves?"
Huffman compared Reddit's structure to the federal system. The company acts as federal government. Each subreddit acts as a state. He wants subreddit governance to work more like elections. Communities should be able to replace their moderators. New communities should be able to form more easily. Subreddits have value similar to domain names, but anyone can claim one for free.
On the Bitcoin question: Reddit explored giving users shares of the company through a cryptocurrency in late 2014. That didn't happen. "There isn't a way to do this in a practical, legal way," Huffman said. But he wants to find a way to pay users in real money. "Cryptocurrencies are a nice way to do that because you remove some of the geographical issues," he said.
Ryan X. Charles, who worked as a cryptocurrency engineer at Reddit, is now building Yours Network, a decentralized social media platform with Bitcoin payments built in. Taringa, a social network in Argentina, integrates Bitcoin payments for creators through Xapo.
