Steve Huffman Wants to Be God of the Mods
Reading Time: 12 minutesWhy Reddit’s CEO Never Saw This Coming, He co-created Reddit. How did he lose the trust of the users who make it special?, Reddit protests: Why users think CEO Steve Huffman is a supervillain.
Steve Huffman has tussled publicly with Reddit’s users before, and he wants everyone to know it. The whole reason the co-founder is currently in charge of the internet’s most important message-board hub is that he was asked to come back in July 2015, in order to quash a racist, sexist Redditor backlash that had contributed to the resignation of then-CEO Ellen Pao. Huffman has occupied the hot seat during every Reddit flashpoint since: the early-Trump-era bans of r/pizzagate and r/altright, both hotbeds of extremism and conspiracy theories; the 2019 investment from Chinese company Tencent, which Redditors feared would interfere with the site’s free-speech ethos; the anti–hate speech policies that the company implemented during the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests; the subsequent booting of notorious spaces like r/The_Donald; and Reddit’s supposed ‘censorship’ of market-breaking r/WallStreetBets traders in 2021. As CEO, Huffman has courted controversy with many of these moves, both within and beyond the freewheeling platform. But he has never been accused of outright villainy, at least not until this year, when he announced a plan that most observers might assume is rather administrative and vanilla: charging third-party apps, bots, and companies for using Reddit’s Data API.
Instead, it caused Reddit’s masses to erupt in protest, with many popular subreddits going dark to signal their opposition to the move. The tech press has called Huffman a ‘tyrant-in-chief.’ The reason? For starters, Huffman’s pricing plan would effectively shut down some beloved third-party Reddit apps by the end of this month. More importantly, in the view of his many critics, the move would contradict the spirit of open collaboration and information sharing that purportedly makes Reddit what it is. The Data API allowed developers to build their own applications on top of Reddit so as to enhance the user experience. Now it will no longer be freely available, thanks to Huffman’s aggressive, seemingly abrupt efforts to make Reddit a profitable business—and to get Reddit’s piece from another new industry whose success depends in part on Reddit’s archives.
Huffman’s public reactions to Redditors’ outrage haven’t helped. While he once appeared even-keeled yet decisive while dealing with online mobs, he appears to have alienated a far wider swath of users by coming off as hard-nosed, condescending, and stubborn. In recent media interviews, he’s derided the community moderators behind the protests as ‘landed gentry,’ appeared to lie about his negotiations with third-party vendors, praised Elon Musk’s entropic Twitter reign, and struck a combative tone with tech journalists over the site’s mass subreddit blackouts. Hundreds of Reddit’s volunteer moderators, many of whom oversee multiple forums, have signed an open letter slamming the company’s ‘threatening behavior‘ (a characterization executives deny), and publications are wondering aloud whether the influential website can survive the whole ordeal.
It’s a surprising place for Huffman to end up. When then–board member Sam Altman asked him to become Reddit CEO in 2015, Huffman agreed because, as he told Kara Swisher in 2017, he feared the aforementioned anti-Pao uprising would kill the platform for good. Nearly a decade later, he’s the Main Character of a truly existential Reddit crisis. Huffman’s return to Reddit, he told Swisher in a separate conversation, came about because he thought the company was ticking off ‘the checklist of things a company would do to kill themselves: We weren’t hiring. We were in the press for all of the wrong reasons. Our users were in open revolt. The employee morale was very low. The product wasn’t changing.’ Yes, it all sounds very familiar.
Taking Reddit into the 2020s involves complex decision making about its money-torching business model, the company’s stagnant plans to go public, the troves of free Reddit content used by richer companies like Sam Altman’s OpenAI, and some ever-confounding dilemmas around free speech and information management in the modern age—not to mention a group of users who make Reddit what it is, and don’t want to be controlled. Steve Huffman was once perceived by these users as being Reddit’s savior. What, exactly, did he do to them?
Along with his Reddit co-founders, Huffman helped define the 21st-century internet—for better and for worse, and with the help of figures who’d later become tech overlords in their own right. Back in 2005, during their senior year at the University of Virginia, Huffman and his roommate Alexis Ohanian met with influential coder and entrepreneur Paul Graham, who helped them brainstorm ‘the front page of the internet’ concept and invited them to pitch his new startup incubator, Y Combinator. Huffman then built Reddit in a coding language preferred by Graham and officially launched the site after graduation, boosted by Y Combinator’s financial support and the technical assistance offered by hacking prodigy Aaron Swartz; the next year, as the company matured and user growth skyrocketed, the three devs sold the site to Condé Nast, whose parent company owns Reddit to this day. Huffman and Ohanian stayed on to help develop Reddit’s most iconic features—user-created subreddits, open-source architecture, an advertising-centric business model—before departing the company in late 2009 for other ventures. They wouldn’t stay away long. Ohanian would return as executive chairman in 2014, after then-CEO Yishan Wong resigned following a (somewhat comical) geographic dispute with Altman, then the president of a kingmaking Y Combinator that had just raised another $50 million for Reddit. Huffman was back the following year.
By that time, the growing pains plaguing the social media industrial complex had become painfully apparent. Reddit, in particular, was strained by the contradictions of the triple role it wished to play within this ecosystem: as a news and current-events platform, as a home to communities that congregated around countless niche interests, and as a professed ‘bastion of free speech‘ and activism regardless of ideology. All of which became harder to maintain in the midst of high-profile controversies on the platform: false accusations regarding the Boston Marathon bombing that spread on Reddit, mass distribution of celebrity nude photos, involvement in Gamergate brigades, and the advent of subreddits rampant with child porn, graphic snuff films, or unfiltered hatred of various marginalized groups.
It’s to their credit that Ohanian and Huffman took critical, forceful action to clean up these messes, tackling these and other, related challenges that arose with the 2016 election cycle. While users had raged at Ellen Pao for shutting down subreddits that trafficked in racism and homophobia, Huffman kept restricting and banning users and subreddits that encouraged bullying, doxing, and violent conspiracism. Not that he and Ohanian didn’t make mistakes along the way, like Huffman’s silent editing of comments made about him in r/The_Donald. Still, it was clear the two took seriously the responsibility of making Reddit safer for users (and advertisers), even as tech media mourned the site’s persistent chaos.
Yet if Huffman succeeded at pushing back against Reddit’s bigotry and enthusiasm for, um, untoward imagery, he never seemed to have anticipated the very different kind of uprising he faces now—namely, over the tech that serves as a manifestation of Reddit’s founding ethos. That, and the challenge of evolving a platform constructed by self-labeled ‘techno-libertarians‘ to the demands of our current high-interest-rate era—which is becoming the artificial-intelligence era as well.
The fact is that the core of Reddit—its bare-bones design and volunteer-run community harbors—is symbolic of a Web 1.0 ideology appealing and admirable in its open-to-all utopianism, yet constrained by (what else?) the dicta of global capitalism. In an April interview on the podcast The Social Radars, Huffman spoke to the motivators that guided his and Ohanian’s early days in establishing and running Reddit: building everything up with a ‘shoestring’ team, thinking of Reddit more as a ‘homework assignment’ for Y Combinator than as a business, stepping away from a Condé regime that wanted him to treat Reddit like, well, a company. Huffman has also noted that he was far less public- and business-oriented than Alexis Ohanian, preferring to code while Ohanian made the networking rounds. Such a disparity became more apparent when Ohanian left again in 2020, leaving the software guy in charge.
Reddit is one of the most-visited websites on the web, boasting 430 million monthly active users and a consistent monthly average of 1.7 billion page views. The company is currently valued at $10 billion. Still, as so many tech companies have learned the hard way, booming usership of freemium platforms (Reddit has a paid tier) does not necessarily make for a sustainable business on its own. That $10 billion valuation is lower than what Reddit sought for the initial public offering it began planning in late 2021, which is part of the reason why it still hasn’t officially gone public (along with the general slowdown in the IPO market throughout 2022). And as the Observer noted in February, Reddit’s $510 million earnings last year lagged far behind those of its social-network competitors, which regularly notch revenue in the multibillions. Fidelity Investments, which spearheaded a major 2021 investment round that sparked the social network’s IPO filing, marked down its Reddit stake earlier this year by 41 percent. Subscription numbers for Reddit’s ad-free service remain frustratingly low at 344,000—that is, about 0.6 percent of its daily active usership.
Even so, Huffman declared his unflappable intent to follow through with the IPO. ‘The way you could criticize Reddit is that we weren’t a company—we were all heart and no head for a long time,’ he told GQ in an April interview. ‘So I think it’d be really hard for me and for the team to kill Reddit in that way.’ When asked about the ‘greatest threat to Reddit,’ he cited governmental proposals to modify Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. Clearly, he didn’t consider Reddit’s Data API charges a threat to his company’s survival.
It might have seemed a reasonable executive decision. Altman may not be anywhere near Y Combinator or Reddit’s boardroom these days, but his decisions are still weighing on the network: When his company OpenAI released ChatGPT in November, it immediately inspired an industry arms race and raised still-unanswered questions over copyright text and fair use. To put it in layman’s terms: how fair it was for OpenAI to raise billions off the strength of a chatbot whose data models were trained on intellectual property freely offered across the internet (including articles from the very website you’re reading). Reddit discussions are important and have real worth, for academic research, for journalism, for archival purposes, and, yep, for training generative-text tools like ChatGPT. ‘The Reddit corpus of data is really valuable,’ Huffman told the New York Times. ‘But we don’t need to give all of that value to some of the largest companies in the world for free.’
He’s not wrong. Why should Sam Altman and Sundar Pichai benefit from the free and underpaid labor behind the training data that’s made apps like ChatGPT and Google’s Bard such a sensation? If news companies are negotiating agreements with OpenAI right now, why shouldn’t these A.I. companies figure out arrangements with the Redditors whose screeds feed their models? The countless unpaid hours that Reddit enthusiasts and moderators put into maintaining the ecosystems, which give the platform both its financial and communitarian worth, were meant for the benefit of other Redditors seeking to customize and improve the experience. For example, the amateur developers who used Reddit’s API to build their own compatible mobile apps while the company dallied on making an official, workable one. Not the A.I. execs launching the spampocalypse-enabling apps that make Redditors’ lives harder.
Here comes the rub. When an audience member at Huffman’s 2019 conversation with Kara Swisher asked him what he planned to do about companies like OpenAI scraping Reddit data, the CEO emphasized that ‘it’s really important we allow Reddit to stay public. … We do try to limit people scraping us, but there’s no way we’re going to practically prevent the development of A.I.’ In fact, he added, it might only be a boon for A.I. models to use Reddit discourse: ‘I would love to train A.I. models on the best of humanity.’ Yet not only is Huffman now disparaging A.I.’s Reddit use, but the very way he wishes to shield his company goes against everything Redditors treasure about his creation.
When Huffman first revealed his API-pricing plans, he didn’t offer a price tag; it was the disgruntled dev behind Apollo, the most popular Reddit iOS app, who revealed in late May that the price tag would force him to pay $20 million a year in order to keep his baby humming. Over the following days, confused and upset Redditors reacted to the news and demanded an audience with Huffman, as other third-party developers noted how the costs would affect and possibly kill off their products. By June 2, the anonymous Redditors behind the new r/Save3rdPartyApps forum had organized a sitewide blackout of Reddit forums to kick off on June 12, leading with a post laying out the stakes at hand. ‘Even if you’re not a mobile user and don’t use any of those apps, this is a step toward killing other ways of customizing Reddit, such as Reddit Enhancement Suite or the use of the old.reddit.com desktop interface,’ user TopTomCat wrote.
By then, it was pretty clear Reddit was serious about forcing dramatic change; on June 6, Huffman announced he was laying off 5 percent of the company’s workforce and slowing down hiring plans. Not that a need for budgetary adjustments mollified anyone. On June 7, the subreddit for the site’s moderators shared details from a company call with developers, in which it insisted that despite the outrage, ‘there will be little to no deviation‘ from the new pricing plan and structure. ‘For many of us, the details of the API changes are not the most important point anymore. This decision, and the subsequent interaction with users by admins to justify it, have eroded much of the confidence and trust in the management of reddit,’ read the r/ModCoord post.
Huffman stepped in to do damage control only to really step in it. In a lengthy June 9 post on r/Reddit—the main forum on the platform—he offered more details on the API plan with no sign of wavering: ‘Reddit needs to be a self-sustaining business, and to do that, we can no longer subsidize commercial entities that require large-scale data use.’ Huffman stated that ‘over 90% of apps’ still aligned with Reddit’s added requirements and, thus, could ‘continue to access the Data API for free.’ These included moderator tools, automated community-function bots, and ‘non-commercial, accessibility-focused apps and tools,’ and did in fact exclude ‘some apps such as Apollo, Reddit is Fun, and Sync,’ which ‘decided this pricing doesn’t work for their businesses and will close,’ Huffman added.
How did Reddit users react? Well, here’s how the Verge’s Wes Davis summarized the 16,000-comment discussion: ‘There were a lot of f-bombs from commenters. A lot of people called him a coward. If there are positive comments, I didn’t find them.’ Indeed, a few subreddits went dark that very day in response to the memo. But the official 48-hour shutdown kicked off by plan on June 12, with about 9,000 subreddits (including some of Reddit’s most popular) going private in solidarity and fueling a temporary crash of the overall website. Even after the official blackout period ended, many high-profile communities geared up for an indefinite strike; the New York Times reported Tuesday that ‘more than 3,200 message boards … remained restricted or private,’ while some high-traffic communities that returned to public view kept up their opposition by posting memes meant to mock Huffman personally. Over the course of the blackout, the network shed millions of its daily users.
Huffman has appeared to take all of this pretty personally. The CEO has consistently dismissed the protest, telling Reddit employees in a leaked memo that, ‘like all blowups on Reddit, this one will pass’ and claiming there was no ‘significant revenue impact.’ In his first media interview post-blackout, Huffman told NPR that ‘it’s a small group that’s very upset,’ that most of the top subreddits had gone back to normal, and that it would benefit Reddit’s balance sheet for users to browse its app rather than a third-party structure, while simultaneously noting that ’97 percent of Reddit users do not use any third-party apps to browse the site.’ A new fact sheet for ‘understanding Reddit’s recent API updates,’ on top of interviews with the Verge and NBC News, did not de-escalate things; in the latter conversation, for one, Huffman proposed making it easier to oust moderators. (He may have followed through, there: Ars Technica reported that moderators of subreddits that protested Huffman by switching their labels to ‘Not Safe for Work’—a formal designation that removes Reddit’s ability to place ads in those communities—have been suspended by the network.)
Another part of the NBC piece that stood out to observers: Huffman mentioned that he’d chatted with Elon Musk about platform ownership, and uplifted Musk’s chaotic Twitter regime ‘as an example for Reddit to follow.‘ Whether you like or dislike what Musk did with Twitter, this is a strange comparison to make, as the network remains a business failure by all objective measures—and sits in a much worse spot in terms of revenue, user favor, and advertising spend. Contra Huffman’s statements, Twitter is not financially ‘breaking even,’ not least because it’s facing a multibillion-dollar bank-debt hole that will plague the company for years. What’s more, Musk’s own users voted for him to install a new CEO, not something Huffman should aspire toward. It’s also worth mentioning that Musk took Twitter/X Corp. from public to private, while Huffman is planning to do the opposite with Reddit.
It’s a bit dangerous, too, for Huffman to dismiss the protesters with similar language to how he referred to the mobs that came for Ellen Pao (‘a toxic minority’). Various subreddits have compromised by continuing forms of protest that don’t involve shutting off access to their servers, like r/PoliticalHumor’s gambit of turning all its members into mods. Multiple third-party developers are basically calling Huffman a liar, releasing communications that counter the CEO’s claims that some developers either refused to negotiate with him or behaved unreasonably. Not that there aren’t more extreme elements: The Verge reported Monday that a hacker group that had carried out a successful Reddit phishing attack in February is now claiming to hold 80 gigabytes of data for ransom: $4.5 million, plus a reversal of the API plans.
Huffman’s scramble to increase revenue underlines something he’s previously admitted to—that he isn’t really sure how to run Reddit like a business, and he’s adjusting his leadership style to try to get there. It’s one thing, and hardly a small one, to network with the right people, sign on investors, build up an information monolith, and convince a volunteer community to make your vision possible; it’s another thing to turn this into a moneymaking enterprise. It’s not unfair of Huffman to invoke the staggering costs of running Reddit, the imperative to increase revenue, and the opportunistic ways outside actors take advantage of the site’s (mostly) free and open resources. But to attempt a fix by announcing a fundamental shift to the website, obscuring the specific details, offering few disclosures to the community members who once appreciated your transparency, and then shit-talking and scoffing at them in the press? You can see why they’re pissed. Huffman always viewed his baby as being powered by its people, and he granted them ample power with only occasional clampdowns when the unruly crowds truly worsened the experience for everyone else. But the Redditors protesting now aren’t asking for the right to revenge porn; they want to preserve the spirit of the platform. And Huffman might cut off their power just for that.
With Reddit, Huffman helped build something both marvelous and terrible in its reach and power, and one can hardly envy the challenges he’s had to face down, whether they’ve had to do with racist user cabals or making good on investors’ funding. But banning Redditors who celebrate lynchings isn’t the same as banning Redditors who understand that their free labor is the whole reason you have the pedestal you do. It’s hardly villainous to demand that some things change in anticipation of an information-guzzling, A.I.–saturated future. It’s something else when you try to overhaul the entire experience of a site on short notice—and then mock, belittle, and brute-force the users who get upset. Huffman once understood that, when squaring up with angry Redditors, you had to work with them while making your position clear. But now it’s not clear if anyone in that community will want to work with him again.
Reference: https://slate.com/technology/2023/06/reddit-protests-steve-huffman-api-chaos.html
Ref: slate
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