Why Reddit’s CEO Never Saw This Coming
slate.com
Steve Huffman co-created Reddit. Is he trying to quash what's made it so special?

Huffman dismissed the mod protesters with similar language to how he referred to the mobs that came for Ellen Pao (“a toxic minority”). 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

  • zombiepete@beehaw.orgEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    What spez wants is to be a notorious billionaire, respected for making reddit a profitable social media company. What he is, and what he probably always will be, is a shitty leader who doesn’t actually have a lot of business sense making decisions using emotion and ego and alienating a chunk of the user population.

    Hard to say if he will suffer any real consequences for this, but at least in some important circles he’s lost a lot of clout.

  • Banzai51@midwest.socialEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    Even Slate can’t get the framing right. It’s not that Reddit wants to charge for API access, it’s they set an absurdly high rate that signals the intent is to kill those 3rd party apps. And Ellen Pao didn’t have a disastrous tenure. It is that she was setup to fail. She was given marching orders to do what Huffman and other Reddit execs were too frightened to do. When the backlash from the hate users came, Huffman and Reddit threw her under the bus rather than say, “we’re cleaning up for an IPO and this needs to be done.” Spez then walked in saying, “look at me! I’m your savior!” The idiots on Reddit didn’t realize they’d been duped. Remember, Spez never reversed any of Pao’s policy decisions.

    The Reddit admins, and Huffman in particular, have a problem telling the truth. That’s the core of the issue.