Reddit CEO praises Elon Musk’s cost-cutting as protests rock platform
Twitter owner Elon Musk may have had an influence on Reddit’s CEO ahead of changes to the website that have resulted in a user-led rebellion on the platform.
In an interview Thursday with NBC News, Reddit CEO Steve Huffman praised Musk’s aggressive cost-cutting and layoffs at Twitter, and said he had chatted “a handful of times” with Musk on the subject of running an internet platform.
Huffman said he saw Musk’s handling of Twitter, which Musk purchased last year, as an example for Reddit to follow.
“Long story short, my takeaway from Twitter and Elon at Twitter is reaffirming that we can build a really good business in this space at our scale,” Huffman said.
“Now, they’ve taken the dramatic road,” he added, “and I guess I can’t sit here and say that we’re not either, but I think there’s a lot of opportunity here.”
Musk shocked Silicon Valley peers with his deep cost cutting at Twitter and began his ownership of the company last fall by axing most of the company’s employees in a chaotic series of decisions that left some people doubting whether Twitter would be able to stay online.
Huffman is trying to turn Reddit profitable after decades as a money-losing website punching above its weight in internet culture.
This week, influential volunteer moderators who manage the communities that make up the site walled off large parts of Reddit, making them inaccessible to most users as part of their demonstration. The protest is a response to part of Huffman’s business plan, which includes potentially charging other tech companies large fees for access to Reddit data.
Huffman said there’s one concrete area where Musk’s example has been clear: job cuts. He said he had often wondered why Twitter under its previous management had struggled to be profitable on a consistent basis despite revenue in 2021 of $5.1 billion.
“As a company smaller than theirs, sub-$1 billion in revenue, I used to look at Twitter and say, ‘Well, why can’t they break even at 4 or 5 billion in revenue? What about their business do we not understand?’ Because I think we should be able to do that quite handsomely,” he said.
“And then I think one of the non-obvious things that Elon showed is what I was hoping would be true, which is: You can run a company with that many users in the ads business and break even with a lot fewer people,” Huffman said.
Musk ended up hiring some employees back, but corporate headcount has remained well below where it was before the acquisition. Musk has also imposed other severe cost-cutting measures, such as not paying some of Twitter’s bills including rent, leading to an eviction order in Colorado.
“They had to do some pretty violent changes and violent surgery to get there,” Huffman said.
It is not clear if Twitter is profitable because some advertisers have left, cutting into revenue, but Huffman said the lesson was on the other side of the ledger.
“People are talking about a lot of things on Twitter, but I think that’s the part that’s the most interesting from my point of view as a business person, is that there actually are good businesses at this scale,” he said.
Reddit’s recent layoffs have been far more modest than Twitter’s. The company said June 6 that it was laying off about 5% of its workforce, or 90 employees.
Huffman did not say how often the chats with Musk have taken place or where they’ve happened.
Twitter and Reddit are both headquartered in San Francisco, and the privately held companies both share Fidelity as an investor. Reddit is majority-owned by Advance Publications, the parent company of Conde Nast, according to CNBC.
Musk’s representatives at Twitter did not immediately respond to a request for comment Friday.
Huffman said that many ordinary people do not realize that there are “two classes of company” in the world of consumer-facing tech businesses: There’s internet heavies such as Google and Facebook, and then there are much smaller but still well-known companies such as Twitter, Snapchat, Pinterest and Reddit.
“From a user’s point of view, you’re like, ‘Oh, they’re just as big. They’re just as successful. You know, maybe a little less so,’” Huffman said.
“But you wouldn’t realize that it’s like a 20, 30x difference in revenue. And, you know, not really profitable — maybe a quarter here or there,” he said.
Twitter had $5 billion in revenue in 2021, the year before Musk’s acquisition. Meta, the owner of Instagram and Facebook, reported revenue that year of $117.9 billion. Alphabet, the owner of Google, reported revenue that year of $257.6 billion.
Huffman said he has not adopted Musk’s thinking across the board.
“There’s a lot of other things where our platforms are just different — how they think about moderation versus us,” he said.
He didn’t cite examples. A Reddit spokesperson Friday declined to cite any specifics but said Reddit is different in multiple ways, including that ordinary users have the power to upvote and downvote posts.
One specific difference is their handling of former President Donald Trump and his supporters. While Musk reinstated Trump’s Twitter account, which prior management had suspended after the Jan. 6 assault on the U.S. Capitol, Reddit has kept in place its ban on the subreddit r/the_donald, a gathering spot for Trump’s supporters.
Elsewhere in the interview with NBC News, Huffman criticized the organizers of this week’s blackout, saying he wanted to pursue rules changes that would allow ordinary Reddit users to vote them out. He compared the long-tenured, difficult-to-oust moderators as “landed gentry,” and some moderators fear Huffman may force them out.
That someone looks at how Elon handled Twitter and goes ""Yes! that's exactly what I want to do." is wild. I have no words, but it does explain so much of how things have gone down.
Especially when his openly stated goal is to IPO.
"Wish you could've bought in on Elon's (estimated) 66% losses? Buy Reddit!"
I'm sure it will be shorted by a lot of rich folk
Neither are publicly traded...
Yeah, you'd think this is an Onion article.
"Flaming Turd Praises Dumpster Fire's Cost-Saving Self-immolation"
spez is a Musk fanboi. What a surprise.
Reddit's clearly in a death spiral, but I've been wondering if was going to go thru an "alt right" phase. Guess we know now.
Jan 6th literally was planned and executed on thedonald, which only got to the critical mass it did because reddit refused to handle it.
I'm not sure what you mean here. the_donald was shut down in June 2020 according to wikipedia. And the insurrection happened 6 months later, Jan 2021.
So... "fun" fact since I was following that shitshow at the time. When r/T_D got booted off reddit, they congregated to a site called thedonald[dot]win. That site later got renamed to patriots[dot]win. They were very much hyping up Jan6th in the days leading up to it and were absolutely looking forward to getting violent.
I don't think it's an exaggeration to say reddit's tolerance towards T_D was one of the root-causes towards what happened in J6th.
Because it, as a massive problem instance for the alt-right to congregate, was allowed to build up and do whatever it wanted unfettered, once they did action it it was far too late. They immediately moved offsite to thedonald.win (which was r/thedonald 1:1), and continued their actions there. It allowed them to conglomerate, coordinate, and show each other that there was enough of them to try and pull off heinous shit.
That makes sense, thanks. Btw you might want to remove that link, it just points to a site that tries to download a file.
The contents of the file, just named "download" without an extension for the people who are curious but don't want to join some Trump botnet:
Pretty underwhelming. I guess they run out of effort.
LOL thanks for checking that out. i was on mobile and didn't want to figure out how to read the contents.
Oh interesting, it's not showing as a link for me. I've edited. Thanks for the heads up!
No problem. It's probably jerboa doing that lol. It's not the best at handling links yet.
had that subreddit not already moved offsite by that point? or do you mean that they only had enough momentum to carry a substantial userbase off-site because reddit dragged their feet for so long on doing anything about it? if the latter, I agree.
The latter exactly. Because Spez and Reddit as a whole have refused to take action on them for literal years, they built up a critical mass, and were able to both plan a migration and do so successfully.
Has it not been going through an alt right phase for years? They've put off banning those communities or applying any kind of moderation for as long as humanly possible. I'm pretty sure reddit was one of the biggest breeding grounds for the alt right growing as quickly as it did on the internet
I think that the company was taking money from someone for letting it go on like that.
They currently let mass account harvesting and spamming go on for some reason. I think it's because it inflates user numbers and the reposting makes it look like there's more content than there really is.
I would not be surprised if they sold accounts themselves to media firms. They even mentioned media campaigns in their leaked letter.
My goodness, so it didn't just feel like Huffman was a discount Elon but that's literally what he is aspiring to?
I don't know what could be more pathetic than the MBA*hole emulating the Blood Emerald Silverspoon Kid Without Skills.
Reddit is so going down the drain, the downward cycle was palpable over the last years but now they're accelerating with Mach 3.
they want that sweet IPO pump and dump. when he sells, you'll know it's time to short the shit out of it. and that's if it even happens at this rate, fidelity might up and say fuck you and cut them again, who knows.
I see the children have migrated from Reddit.
Honestly this explains everything so neatly that if you put it on TV the audience would complain that it's not believable. All of these rich assholes are the same.
I know that I certainly believed this article to be very well crafted satire at first. Because how could it possibly so very on the nose in reality?
Tech bros are a scourge on society.
Why am I not surprised?
What annoys me the most is the stance he keeps trying to project that reddit is just a a 'poor lil company, never any profit, just a little fish'.
Hearing that he wants to bring in the ability to oust established moderators by votes?
Good luck, who wants to literally give their time and energy to this company now for free? Not me anymore.
What a sad, sad interview.
It's all coming together now. Elon is his role model and reddit's light treatment of alt-right nonsense under the guise of "free speech" is because he's a true believer (most have always suspected this). Not that it's all that surprising I guess, he is a CEO.
I thought Spez has some sketchy "prepper" beliefs? I'm not surprised tbh.
Can we oust the CEO by vote too?
Well, if there was any doubt left that spez was a POS, this officially ends it.
Wait, this guy looked at twitter and thought to himself - this is the way?! Eat the rich, it's the the only thing left at this point.
He's a doomsday prepper with a massive bunk. He's actively driving society to the brink thinking bunker living is going to save him and his millions. All it takes is one trigger-happy shotgun wielder to realize your millions mean nothing. But always remember—he's hoping, expecting society as we know it to end in his life time.
Yeah, it's only the rich that are standing in the way of us all doing brilliant things. Or doing anything productive or interesting.
Of course spez would lick Elon’s boots.
This is hilariously timely. I was just thinking yesterday, after the announcement that Twitter was being evicted from their Boulder HQ, that Spez's self-destruction of Reddit parallels Elon's death spiral.
@joeygibson @IncidentalIncidence u/spez literally looks like he could lick Elon's boots
Elon Musk cuts costs by not paying operating expenses or his employees. If that's what you want to emulate, congratulations! Your soul has been completely devoured by corporate America.
The 5% lay off is just a start.
They're gonna cut corners wherever they can.
I've been on twitter once a day and it is overrun by bots,trolls and low quality tweets.
Insane what a sh*tshow it became.
Funny story: I used to work for a company that Elon didn’t pay his bill to. The tool fell under the department that was also responsible for content moderation, so I imagine he figured their tools were just blockers to free speech. But this tool was actually used to make sure ads weren’t being purchased with stolen credit cards.
It doesn’t take a genius to understand the concept of due diligence or that cutting costs can also cut your revenue stream… but hey, whatever floats your boat!
We all suspected that he was following Elons way of running a business, but this just confirms it.
What an ass.
It's funny - I thought the pricing changes had to do with following Twitter's lead, but I had no idea he would be that down with Musk. If I were an employee at Reddit now, I'd take this as a serious red flag and start looking.
All the fucking awful CEOs are idolizing him and Bezos and everyone like them, too far up their own assholes to care that they’re idolizing exploitation and their employees hate their guts.
There are far, far worse industries for exploitation.
The meatpacking industry fast food, and garment industries are an entirely different level of hell than any of those companies. Weird how we don't see nearly the amount of pushback against fast food and fast fashion.
Yeah. Straight into the ground.
Which is hilarious considering they are in the opposite situation. Reddit is trying to IPO. Twitter was made private. Two different companies in very different stages of their existence. Which shows what a ridiculous observation this was by Huffman.
You invest when you want to go public and grow. Twitter is a far more mature company with a much larger number of employees.
What all this has highlighted for me (and clearly a bunch of other people) is just how little friction is required for me to say “eh, I could live without [reddit | twitter]. Switch to a different app? No thanks. That’s no effort. I deployed my own Lemmy instance and figured out the fediverse instead of downloading the official Reddit app from the App Store. I think that shows how little loyalty some people have to these centralized platforms.
Soooooo, spez plans to get kicked out of his office for not paying rent then?
I'm coming to conclusion that corperations sometime have an almost pro-wrestling outlook and make their CEO's heels. Again and again, CEO's make themselves publicly quite villainous, the company fires them, then rolls back 5% of their unpopular decisions in the name of "good will". I will be shocked if spez has this job in 3 months and both reddit and spez will be richer for it.
What kind of a fucking broken human somehow reaches the conclusion that Twitter is competently handled?
It's laughable that Huffman thinks people don't realize how much smaller Reddit is than Google or Facebook.
Most of what Huffman said here is about cost-cutting. If Reddit had 1800 employees before the layoffs, then yes, it's probably bloated and laying off another 800 employees probably wouldn't affect the end-user experience.
The problem remains that Huffman sees how users want to use Reddit as bad for the company. There doesn't seem to be any reason why Reddit couldn't have monetized their API through ads, making third party apps similarly profitable as their own app. And if their own app isn't profitable through ads, then what's their plan? Moving all those users to their first party app doesn't fix anything.
Very strange they didn't just charge them for ads through the API. The only explanation is ego, which makes a lot of sense, and wanting to get people on their app to steal and sell their data.
It takes a special flavor of insecurity to simp the Musk.
Is this man mentally ill? Is he deliberately trying to get himself fired?
A big reason Musk has gotten away with things so far is because he spent years making himself famous. He’s also among the richest people in America. Even if they don’t like him, people will cut him some slack (up to a point) because he’s Elon Fucking Musk.
It’s even his name is in the title of this article, because nobody knows or cares who Steve Huffman is. Until you get into the article itself, Huffman is referred to as “Reddit CEO”.
I mean, also, Twitter's getting evicted from their Boulder HQ because Musk hasn't paid the bills, so...
That’s why I qualified it with the “up to a point” bit lol
CEOs tends to think they're special. They do not think they are there because of right time right place.
I work in tech and I have seen how a small change in organization structure, such as a Product Manager leaving, or adjusting how Product, Engineering and Marketing working together, having a huge impact on how the business operates. Yet most CEOs think the company is where they are because of their own decisions. It's quite the other way around: CEOs suggesting stupid policies and other people cleaning up the shit, like "let's all go back to office because I'm lonely here", despite majority of employees work remotely from another fricking country.
Oh god almighty I knew Spez was bad but this is beyond the fucking pale.
I will always stop and pay respect to dickbutt... absolute legend.
Even from a purely capitalistic viewpoint, what kind of lunatic would hitch his wagon to a company that is estimated to be worth 1/3rd of what it cost just a short time ago?
The rich are not immune to memes and grift. In fact, they are much more susceptible to it because they think their money makes them better and smarter than the average Joe falling for it.
Rich people are by and large idiots if it wasn't already obvious.
To be fair the estimated worth was around 10-15bln before Musk bought it so it really didn't lose worth, Musk simply overpaid for the ownership.
42bln is what Musk considered a worthy price to make it private, not its actual worth. I'm fact Musk knows it's not worth that much because he tried to wiggle out from paying that much.
I feel like framing not paying bills as 'cost-cutting' is perhaps a bit kind.
I mean, it seems to work way more often then it should.
Those sympathies with a fascists are alarming and should make people worry much more than the Reddit-drama itself. Anybody cares about that?
I mean wasn't it Spez who's gone off the survivalist deep end? If I recall right he had some pretty interesting ideas, something along the lines of how he'd rule over us plebs after the collapse comes and he and his private army emerge from his rich person doomsday bunker. Supporting Space Himmler is par for the course
Isn't that what Charles Manson thought about the supposed race war?
Honestly no idea, I don't really know anything about him except that he killed people. Wasn't there some sort of group too?
Yeah, the "Manson Family". The murders he is best known for (Sharon Tate and co.) were actually performed by his followers. He was convicted on the basis of conspiracy. Though apparently he was directly involved in a couple other murders as well.
Anyway, supposedly the Manson Family had this idea about a major race war (predicted by The Beatles' White Album, of all things). They expected to wait out the war and then emerge and rule the ashes. Though Manson himself denied that scenario he was following, I think some of his followers supported it.
People believe the darndest things
Don’t forget: Charles Manson’s entourage harassed the Devil’s Hole pupfish! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=voe1LXhB7bE
such a good channel!
Haha, Space Himmler, will be using that from now on, thank you!
Heh yeah I think it's superior to Space Karen
I think Space Göring would be even more fitting. The Luftwaffe was like Göring‘s pet toy. Also he took a lot of drugs.
My question is how long are they going to let him flounder as CEO? He thinks Musk is doing a great job at Twitter when in reality, there are so few advertisers on the platform that once you block the handful of Amazon bot accounts you have a basically ad-free feed. Before Musk took over, you'd see advertising from trusted brands. Now? It's a video of some useless junk and a link to Amazon to buy it—or weirdly custom t-shirts. That's not good business. Twitter is gasping and dying and the CEO of reddit sees it and goes, "damn, maybe we should be doing that?"
If they go through with letting users vote out moderators it will be an absolute shit show. Brigading alt-right discord channels will organize the ouster of pretty much every "librul" subreddit's mods and destabilize the entire platform. In a few months it will be a voat like hellscape. I don't think this idiot would mind that though as long as he gets his big payout from going public.
If I was a powermod, the chaos monkey in me would already be selling my account to some alt-right chud for a couple grand, and a few weeks afterwards I would announce that I did so for maximum chaos.
oh wait thats such a good idea. Call it a "buy-out" - compile a list of like 1000 moderators who want to voluntariy leave; then sell those accounts on the dark web and just disappear.
It's the greatest surprise ever. It's the perfect shovel for the 6 feet deep hole Reddit has started to digg.
Yeah everything else aside, praising musk is enough to make me jump ship.
"Long story short, my takeaway from Twitter and Elon at Twitter is reaffirming that we can build a really good business in this space at our scale,”
For the people in the back who think the situation is salvable and are caring about the "communities".
It is gonna be wild the coming months.
We exist for business.
What sad direction the internet has taken in the last 20 years.
So when they said the API pricing wasn't going to be anything like twitter was a fucking lie.
I'm not surprised.
This guy is such a dweeb.
This is incredible. I hope they get married.
Hahahaha of the list of all the people not to emulate in this day and age, Elon definitely tops it. Well done, Huffman. How's that last thunk from the final nail in the coffin sound?
Well that's gonna be a major yikes from me dawg. I knew it was bad when Reddit had to be shamed by CNN before they removed /r/jailbait. I knew it got worse during the 2016 election. But my god this is just fucking insane.
Of course. Twitter employs moderators, Reddit would never pay for that!
How does he keep getting worse
Oh, bless his heart. He grew his edgy beard, and now he's emulating Elon. Now that's a path to success.
He has to be trolling
Right? How out of touch can you be to use Elon Musk as a role model?
They both deserve failure and ridicule, and I hope they get it in spades.
Perfect! Let them burn. They are inadvertently growing the fediverse at an accelerated rate!
Even more reason to just stay off Reddit for good.
Should this guy be on meds? It seems a lot like Ye's situation at this point.
Just more confirmation that running away from reddit was the right choice. We all owe the developers of the fediverse for have all these platforms and welcoming everyone.
Thats really funny
Corrupted minds think alike
@IncidentalIncidence u/spez doubling again basically. Glad I left that dumpster fire and it sucks what will come next !
I am just happy that I am not there so my popcorn doesn't burn, but pop as it burns away like twitter is🍿
https://imgur.com/gallery/tGPVBTg