Spez

"Spez" is the Reddit username of Steve Huffman, the site's co-founder and chief executive, who posts as u/spez. The handle is so closely identified with him that it appears in coverage of the company as a second name, and it has also entered Reddit slang as a verb, "to spez," meaning to covertly or maliciously edit another user's content while holding administrative power.

The verb usage traces to November 2016, when Huffman used admin tools to secretly alter user comments in a pro-Trump community, changing insults aimed at himself so they instead targeted that community's moderators, with no edit marker shown. He admitted the change within about an hour, reversed it, and acknowledged that, as chief executive, he should not have done it. The episode matters as a vivid demonstration of the asymmetry of power on the platform, since the same person who sets the rules also controls the infrastructure that records what users say, and it permanently linked the founder's pseudonym to questions about administrative overreach and the integrity of the public record on Reddit.