Former Reddit CEO Ellen Pao warned the public back in July 2015 that the trolls are winning—and Steve Huffman decided to combat it last week in a rather bizarre "eye for an eye" sort of way. The co-founder and CEO was caught "trolling the trolls" (editing user comments) in r/The_Donald, the pro-Trump subreddit. Now, in a lengthy Reddit post, Huffman is acknowledging that his response to the harassment wasn't exactly best—and that Reddit will be taking action to police its "most toxic users."
Huffman, a self-proclaimed troll in his younger days, first apologised for his actions from last week:
"I am sorry for compromising the trust you all have in Reddit...I honestly thought I might find some common ground with that community by meeting them on their level. It did not go as planned...While many users across the site found what I did funny, or appreciated that I was standing up to the bullies, many others did not."
While Huffman noted that Reddit will not be banning r/The_Donald outright, he explained that Reddit will be taking a "more proactive approach to policing behavior that is detrimental to Reddit." The platform has identified "hundreds of the most toxic users" and will be "taking action...ranging from warnings to timeouts to permanent bans." In addition, there will be specific restrictions for the pro-Trump subreddit:
"Posts stickied on r/the_donald will no longer appear in r/all. r/all is not our frontpage, but is a popular listing that our most engaged users frequent, including myself. The sticky feature was designed for moderators to make announcements or highlight specific posts. It was not meant to circumvent organic voting, which r/the_donald does to slingshot posts into r/all, often in a manner that is antagonistic to the rest of the community."
Huffman concluded his post by highlighting that they will "continue taking on the most troublesome users," adding that if this action doesn't improve, "we will continue to take privileges from communities whose users continually cross the line—up to an outright ban."
