[music playing] ALEXIS OHANIAN: In 2005, Steve Huffman and I started Reddit.com.

And we wanted it to be the place to go to find out what was new and interesting online.

KEVIN MORRIS: Reddit's so good at pushing out these new nuggets of information that there's always something new.

STEPHEN BRUCKERT: It has qualities of like a real-life physical community.

BLAIR DRAGER: The Reddit community just wants to know everything.

You can find anything and everything on Reddit.

ALEXIS OHANIAN: The essence of Reddit is let's give people the power to submit links, to vote on them, to discuss them.

And we'll trust the best stuff will bubble up.

BLAIR DRAGER: If it's funny or people enjoy it, it will get uploaded or downloaded according to whatever people think.

KEVIN MORRIS: A subreddit is a form that you create and you control in whatever way you want to.

There's a subreddit for everything.

KEVIN MORRIS: They're all run by volunteers, people with no formal association to Reddit.

ALEXIS OHANIAN: You want to create a community for people who want to share links about My Little Pony?

Great.

KEVIN MORRIS: There's definitely this really strong subculture on Reddit where people really just want to learn.

So you have r/AskScience!, where you can ask any kind of science question.

And more often than not, you get an actual scientist to come in and give you an answer, usually with citations.

People really appreciate thoughtful responses and well-cited responses.

But at the same time, it's a powerful system for busting hoaxes, checking facts.

And there's nothing more special than being the first person to know that you busted a hoax.

IAmA is a live interview section.

It's just a place for anybody to go, open up a thread, give a little background of yourself, and let Redditors ask questions.

It really runs the gamut from the most ordinary of ordinary to celebrities, politicians, astrophysicists.

There was one from a 9-1-1 operator.

Normally, you would never have a chance to talk to somebody really in-depth who works at a 9-1-1 call center.

So you learn so much about their lives and their careers.

The way that the site works tends to attract people that want to know the truth.

BLAIR DRAGER: Reddit is about the user.

Reddit is about the person who's on it.

As a whole, we always want to see the good in the community.

We always want to see things work out.

There was an idea that somebody was, like, why don't we have a Reddit Secret Santa?

And everybody was, like, OK, that's a great idea.

And they made a website, so all you had to have was a Reddit account.

You can either select to be matched up with somebody in the United States or somebody in the world.

It's the largest gift exchange ever.

Random Acts of Pizza is a subreddit, and people that don't have a lot of money just go to, and they post their story, post their situation.

And if you have a good enough reason, somebody will just order you a pizza online and deliver it to your house.

And I thought that was amazing.

It's a weird sense of trust people have in each other when they're doing this.

This is proving that, hey, there is good in the world.

To have a community coming together, it's just great.

Generally, people will respect one another.

Yes, they'll make immature jokes.

But most of the time, people will always do the right thing.

Reddit is, overall, a nice place.

But its relationship with women is really complicated.

Any picture of a woman who is on the beach, and she's found a cute little turtle, and she's showing the turtle, the top comment will be about her breasts.

SRS MODERATOR: There's a big problem on Reddit with sexism, which is pretty backwards.

Women don't post so you can degrade them.

STEPHEN BRUCKERT: All of this terrible misogynistic shit gets upvoted all the way to the top, like all the time.

SRS MODERATOR: In SRS, we are the majority, and we're sick of seeing the same jokes, the same disparaging humor.

The point of ShitRedditSays is to like have a place to talk about the things that are wrong with mainstream Reddit culture.

SRS MODERATOR: It's a place for people to come together and make fun of the people who are terrible to them.

It's bullying the bullies.

STEPHEN BRUCKERT: Mainstream Reddit's common response to SRS is that they hate free speech.

But sexual harassment in public is clearly not OK. SRS MODERATOR: One of the major problems with self-regulation on Reddit is that you do not have a diverse enough user base.

In society, you have 51% women.

But there aren't 51% women on Reddit.

The active majority, they determine what Reddit is.

Maybe the majority of people on Reddit are men.

Certainly, the voting system would seem to indicate that it's people who believe that women are irrational sex objects.

If we judge Reddit by the voting system, that's what Reddit thinks.

SRS MODERATOR: We're brought up now most any time somebody makes a bad comment.

It opens a dialogue underneath about what SRS is.

And who's SRS?

What are you talking about?

And then somebody else seeing that will come and check us out and be like, oh, my god, I found it.

There's a voice out there.

The conversation that mainstream Reddit is having with and because of ShitRedditSays is developing into real, hard self-examination of their morals and principles and character.

ALEXIS OHANIAN: The internet is this sort of last bastion of free speech.

And we want people to have the freedom to operate in that space.

I got an email about SOPA.

The aim was purportedly to stop online piracy.

That was the Stop Online Piracy Act.

It would give the power to not only shut down a website.

But it was basically placing demands on website creators that were just untenable in a world of user-generated content.

And it wasn't just the economic issue, but it was also a speech issue and a civil rights issue, because it affected every one of us who uses and loves the internet.

The internet is such a vital part of our democracy that we need it protected.

And so we had these meetings here in New York of all these New York tech execs.

And we went around the room and talked about all the things that we were gonna do with our websites to help raise awareness.

And when it got to me, I simply said, oh, we're gonna create a subreddit, you know, SOPA.reddit.

We're just gonna direct the people to it.

And I think there was this moment where everyone kind of looked around and was, like, really?

That was it?

You're not gonna tell your users to do something?

And I had to explain that that's not how Reddit works.

And sure enough, we saw the moderators of Reddit decided that they wanted to black out Reddit.

And so the best thing we could do is provide a platform for that all to spread and then get out of the way and sort of help where we can.

We started to get some of our best ideas and started seeing Redditors encourage other Redditors to start doing things and taking action and creating the tools that would actually help us win the day in Washington.

And I'm extremely proud of the fact that Reddit was the first site to announce going dark.

And after doing so, you saw hundreds of other sites and blogs also announce they were gonna go dark.

Someone did this fabulous infographic that showed the senators before and after that blackout and how they had switched sides so quickly.

The action against that was just another example of us following the lead of the community.

We knew the value in Reddit was in the community.

And as long as we did right by the community, then we would do right by Reddit.

KEVIN MORRIS: The core purpose of the site is that ordinary people are democratically pushing content up.

STEPHEN BRUCKERT: Reddit has a culture, and reddit has a community.

The internet is a place.

ALEXIS OHANIAN: Redditors are, I think, as diverse as any one of us here in the States or any one of us in the world.

BLAIR DRAGER: It's just a constantly changing powerful force of the internet that nobody can really stop.

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