10 Years Ago This Week: Reddit in turmoil

To celebrate 10 years of Creator Weekly, I’m sharing tech highlights from 2015 that still resonate 10 years later. This update was for the week ending June 27, 2015.

Reddit launched in June 2005. Ten years later it was in turmoil, with a crackdown on harassment and the CEO receiving death threats and other abuse.

Big Changes as Reddit Turned 10

In 2015 Reddit celebrated 10 years by listing top posts and comments.

Ten years ago, as Reddit celebrated its 10th birthday, Redditors were angry.

Just a few months earlier Reddit's Privacy Policy was updated to explicitly prohibit revenge porn and there was a crackdown on harassment.

Reddit banned 5 subreddits under the new harassment policy, including one dedicated to mocking fat people that had more than 150,000 members.

If you are reading this and thinking those were good changes, I'm right there with you. But some Redditors considered this censorship and an attack on free speech.

And then a popular Reddit admin, Victoria Taylor, who ran AMAs (Ask Me Anythings), was fired. Moderators protested, and some subreddits were set to private.

And all the blame came down on CEO Ellen Pao. Pao was appointed interim CEO in 2014, and Redditors blamed her for the changes and Taylor's firing.

There was a petition for her to quit. She was harassed and got death threats.

She posted an apology and stepped down in July. She was replaced by co-founder and former CEO Steve Huffman (u/spez), who is still Reddit CEO today.

The View from 2025

AI-powered Reddit Answers

Shortly after Pao stepped down, it was revealed that those unpopular changes had not been her decisions.

What it appears is that Reddit was focused on on growth, which lead to some of the changes.

It has been alleged (or rumored) that Taylor was terminated because Reddit's management wanted to make the AMAs more commercial.

And Pao said that one reason she resigned was that "the board asked me to demonstrate higher user growth in the next six months than I believe I can do while maintaining reddit's core principles."

Under Huffman, Reddit has indeed grown, and (not surprisingly) has continued to come into conflict with its users. In 2023, moderators protested as the platform started charging for access to its API, killing popular 3rd party Reddit-related apps.

Reddit launched an IPO and became publicly traded in 2024, which means that some changes have been suspected of being implemented to maximize shareholder value, rather than enhance the platform.

How is Reddit making money?

They think of themselves as "one of the internet’s largest open archives of authentic and constantly-updated human-generated conversations and experiences".

Questions answered, products reviewed, and problems solved is what they offer. They even have Reddit

It is monetized with ads, of course. And ad-free Reddit Premium subscriptions.

And they have a partnership with Google that provides access to their Data API, the better for Reddit content to appear in Search and train Google's AI models. And Reddit definitely dominates the Google Search results for queries about product reviews and the like.