Hello, Serious Hat time.

1/ Yes, I am a troll. I was a troll in high school on BBSes, in college on CMU bulletin boards, I ran a forum that was more or less my friends trolling each other, etc. I do a fairly good imitation of a professional technology executive when I need to, certainly well enough to understand why something like e.g. the dehrmann event would look incredibly unprofessional, but that situation just had some really weird factors in it. And really, you can't possibly run a site like this without fundamentally being a troll and understanding trolling. When it was announced that I was the CEO, the reaction from every friend who knew me was uniformly uproarious laughter.

Before coming to work for reddit, you know what I used my account for? Making troll/clever comments for karma. You can probably find them if you scroll WAY back to before 2012. It's nice to be able to go back to being a regular reddit user (I couldn't really post under my name a lot while Ellen was CEO because it seemed like it would cause too much interference), though maybe I will use an alt so as to attract less attention.

2/ Don't worry about my career. I don't plan to work in the tech industry again; I think it's time to do something else, likely something that doesn't involve having a salaried job. I have some good money saved up from my time at Facebook to be able to do this, so I am very lucky[1]. It's true that I didn't make much from running reddit, but I deliberately took a lower salary to reduce cash burn and so I could give some underpaid employees a raise. Interestingly, I've received two job offers in the last day or so, despite my supposed unhireability. Go figure.

Also, please don't stalk my wife - she is a very private, introverted person who doesn't like attention and is annoyed/amused at the attention I have received/instigated in the press lately.

3/ I like spez a lot, and I hope he succeeds. The rest of the team there is also very good; I hope no one else leaves. The job is a very, very hard one and it's blazing a new path - there hasn't been a community (forum-style) of this size on the internet ever, and the challenges of running even much smaller ones have been well-documented. I understand now why Presidents and ex-Presidents hang out together and stuff, despite their supposed political differences (and spez and I seem to have a fair bit in common, even).

It does look like I was wrong about /r/coontown specifically (I can predict things directionally but I'm still on the outside like all of you), but I am glad to see that reddit is first trying a method of marginalizing the negative subreddits. I don't think places like /r/BDSMCommunity have anything to worry about. I'm sure there will be a lot of back and forth on policies, which is necessary for figuring out what works.

[1] Spread the wealth: the 5 highest-ranked and 5 lowest-ranked replies (incl. negative score) to this comment 24 hours from now (it is 9:27pm PT) will receive free reddit gold!