Reddit CEO Steve Huffman proposes content policy similar to existing rules, with some vague wording; content violating “common sense of decency” to be hidden
New Reddit rules will crack down on some hate communities, leave others standing — Reddit's new CEO …
Context & Ripple Effects
Two days before this proposal, Steve Huffman told users in an [[a:830997|AMA announcement that some subreddits shouldn't exist and that Reddit wasn't founded as a bastion of free speech]]; weeks earlier, the company had already banned 'Fat People Hate' and other subreddits under new harassment rules. This policy is Huffman codifying that direction into standing site rules.
The immediate reception flagged the core problem: BuzzFeed's follow-up found the proposed policy reworks old ideologies from past CEOs while lacking the specifics needed to root out harassment, leaving 'common sense of decency' undefined even as it becomes enforceable.
First-order effects
- Subreddit communities judged to violate 'common sense of decency' get hidden from general view rather than necessarily deleted, and their moderators now answer to an undefined admin-applied standard instead of a written rulebook.
Second-order effects
- The hide-don't-delete mechanism Huffman sketches here is the direct ancestor of the graduated enforcement he later defended when quarantining /r/The_Donald in 2019, giving admins a middle option between tolerance and banning.
- The vagueness cuts both ways over time: by 2018 Huffman was telling The Verge that open racism and slurs weren't against Reddit's rules, so enforcement under this standard swings with leadership interpretation rather than text.
Third-order effects
- If discretionary standards like 'common decency' become the operative policy, Reddit's governance shifts from rule-based to judgment-based moderation, concentrating power in executives and making each controversy — like Huffman's 2016 apology for editing user comments while targeting 'toxic users' — a referendum on unaccountable criteria.
- For advertisers and communities, an unwritten decency bar means exposure risk can change without any rule changing, pressuring platforms industry-wide to formalize what they will and won't host.
The trend: Major platforms are replacing binary ban-or-allow moderation with graduated visibility controls enforced by discretionary community-standards language, with Reddit as an early and explicit test case.