In the middle of a wide-ranging blackout by many of its largest volunteer-driven communities, Reddit CEO Steve Huffman apparently wants to do to Reddit what Elon Musk did to Twitter.
Reddit is the fifth largest social network in the United States, behind only Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok. It has over 430 million active monthly users, organized in “subreddits”—single-topic communities. While other social media companies struggle with content moderation, these subreddits are moderated by volunteer mods. It is these volunteer mods that are up in arms over Reddit’s sudden "enshittification"—the process by which a social media goes from serving its users, to abusing its network scale for profit and turns to utter shit (click this link to technologist Cory Doctorow’s incredibly perceptive and influential essay on the topic).
In an interview 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 he purchased last year, as an example for Reddit to follow. What kind of moron would take a look at what Musk has done at Twitter--chasing away advertisers, alienating wide swaths of his audience, throwing tens of billions down the drain, and spurring a frenzy to become Twitter’s replacement, and then think—yeah, I want some of that! “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 admitted.
Musk bought Twitter for $44 billion. The debt service alone is $125 million per month. Twitter Blue, Musk’s big idea to overcome the loss of advertisers, is bringing in only about $2 million per month according to leaked internal documents back in March. Musk himself admitted in internal documents that Twitter’s value had dropped by at least $20 billion, while investor Fidelity thinks it’s worth even less—only $15 billion. And Huffman’s takeaway from all that is that Musk built “a really good business.” Yikes!
This week, influential volunteer moderators who manage the communities that make up Reddit walled off large parts of Reddit, making them inaccessible to most users as part of their demonstration against Huffman's proposed changes. The protest is a response to part of Huffman’s business plan, which includes charging third-party tech companies large fees for access to Reddit data.
With a looming IPO and Reddit’s valuation cratering, Huffman is desperate to message his company as an high-earning company deserving a much higher valuation. But instead of pricing its data at a level that would allow a broad ecosystem of third-party Reddit readers, moderator tools, accessibility tools, and other such apps to continue existing, Huffman wants to charge the kind of numbers that would force those third-party companies to spend millions for its data, justifying the higher company valuation he feels entitled to. These third party tools are what the Reddit moderators need to administer content and drive additional users and higher interaction with the site. Yet those thousands of moderators, working for free, making Reddit what it is, are being ignored and outright disrespected, their concerns tossed aside as irrelevant. Without them, there is no Reddit, and Huffman doesn’t seem to get that.
Paying for moderation and community safety costs money. Maintaining infrastructure costs money. Legal compliance
costs money. Those are all things that Musk has tossed aside, and it has
cost him billions in lost advertiser revenue. And as soon as a consensus Twitter alternative emerges, it will likely drain Twitter’s user base.
Could old Twitter have managed better to be profitable? Probably. Is what Musk doing making that happen? Of course not. He has just managed to bring back Nazis, illegal content, the streaming of full-length blockbuster feature films (imagine what those legal settlements will cost Twitter), broken features, erratic performance, and the continued abandonment of brand advertisers.
Huffman also said in the interview, “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.” Musk’s Twitter is not even close to breaking even-- despite massive staff cuts and other severe cost-cutting measures, such as not paying some of Twitter’s bills including rent, leading to an eviction order in Colorado.”
Twitter will very likely be a cautionary case study at business schools in the decades to come. And to close out the interview Huffman does his part for company morale, taking a dump on the people keeping Reddit running. Huffman criticized the organizers of this week’s blackout, saying he was considering pursuing rules changes that may 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.
To remind everyone: these people are working for Reddit for free. There is no glory to dealing with moderation bullshit. It’s a chore, not some kind of lofty position with fame and riches. It seems pretty obvious that Reddit will eventually force some of these moderators out. Is Huffman going to have his own staff step in and do the moderation? Reddit has been laying people off already, and presumably is already thin on staffing.
What happens when a subreddit on fitness becomes a den of homophobia and misogyny? God forbid a woman post a picture of her fitness progress, it’s followed up with 30 creepy men writing gross comments about her looks. It’s the mods who quickly clean up that mess. Or maybe a black teen posts a gym picture, followed by 30 creepy comments about “you look like that because of your genetics.” And never mind all the creepy “no homo” shit when a guy compliments another guy’s gym progress. In a mass-market social media platform like Reddit, it doesn’t take long for a conversation to descend into the worst of what humanity has to offer.
Huffman should be thanking his lucky stars that he doesn’t have to spend billions to moderate Reddit the way Twitter should be doing. Twitter would kill for volunteer moderates like Reddit has. What is with the apparent cognitive decline of the larger "tech bro" community-- blindly following Musk off the ledge like lemmings. Even Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey (one of the key backers of Bluesky,) has descended into the land of anti-vaxx conspiracy theories and has endorsed nutjob Robert F. Kennedy, Jr, for president.
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