The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 16 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Huffman: Community platforms cannot be governed purely like democratic countries
“One of the big learnings is we are not a country. You know, we are a community platform, and we're also a business. This is a place that people have to want to be. You don't, you know, by and large, you don't choose where you live on Earth but you can choose w…”
Huffman: Reddit moderates user behavior rather than user beliefs
“Separating you know, behavior and beliefs. And so we try to spend a lot more time on behavior than we do on beliefs.”
Huffman: Tying social media to real-world identity drives users to ideological extremes
“If you look at the incentives of social media, a lot of it is about, there's a strong kind of, there's a strong attachment to your real world identity and status. And so people are saying things, I think not necessarily because they believe them, but because t…”
Huffman: Peer Feedback Governs Behavior Far Better Than Platform Moderation
“Getting feedback from your peers like that is way more powerful Than getting feedback from, you know, the company or the man.”
Huffman: Manicuring messages and controlling outcomes creates public distrust
“Because that control, that manicuring the message, that kind of pushing people into the desired outcome is what creates that sense of distrust. That sense of I am being manipulated. I am being controlled. I am being constrained.”
Huffman: Reddit's downvote keeps polarizing content at net zero points
“Reddit has the upvote. Reddit also has the downvote. And so that's where community can reject reject behaviors or whatever they don't like. I think this is really powerful because if you're extreme or polarizing, chances are you'll get just as many downs as yo…”
Huffman: Reddit corpus trained all major LLMs
“The other interesting dynamic with Reddit is of course our corpus has been used as a training set for all of the major LLMs.”
Huffman: Reddit's strategy during platform crises was to change nothing
“What I later learned when I came back is the strategy at Reddit was don't change anything.”
Huffman: Allowing users to create communities was Reddit's most important feature
“The most important feature we ever built was for users to create their own communities. We didn't build that until 2008, you know, almost three years later.”
Huffman: Reddit scaled revenue and users without growing team size
“We've been able to grow revenue and users basically without growing the team size which basically means costs have stayed level while we scale the rest of the company.”
Wallach: Mundane LLM training choices will have long-term human impacts
“The decisions that they make could be people in a boardroom saying, do we go with this LLM or do we go to this one? Do we know, do we scrape Reddit for how we're going to train our models, for instance, and scrape X? Or are we going to scrape something else? T…”
Huffman: Reddit held private analyst earnings calls starting in April 2022
“Since April, 20, 22, we've been running the company as a public company. So close the books fast. You know, no mistakes. Do our board meeting. Do earnings calls with the public company analysts. They just weren't public, but we were able to kind of just get in…”
Huffman: Reddit Employees Refused to Wear Swag in Public in 2015
“When I came back to the company employees, they wouldn't wear our swag in public”
Huffman: Reddit forbids AI partners from deanonymizing users or targeting ads
“We don't want any company to use Reddit content to reverse engineer the identity of our users or to use it to better target ads against them.”
Kagan: How I secured free launch ads from Reddit's founders
“And then I got, I asked the founders to give me ads for free. Jeff Berman: The founders of Reddit to give you ads for free. Yeah. Why would they? Noah Kagan: Well, I think because they were launching their ad platform and they wanted some data on it. And so, y…”
Colbert: Reddit users raised $500,000 for DonorsChoose in exchange for an AMA
“We raised another half a million dollars for DonorsChoose to get, people on Reddit saw that we played games with DonorsChoose, and someone from Reddit came to me and said, hey, if we raise a half a million dollars for DonorsChoose, will you do an Ask Me Anythi…”