Sheesh, talk about someone who can’t read a room.
In the middle of a wide-ranging blackout by many of its largest volunteer-driven communities, Reddit CEO Steve Huffman gave what might be one of the most disastrous interviews of the year. In short? He wants to do to Reddit what Elon Musk did to Twitter.
Let’s go through this Huffman interview with NBC News, because it beggars belief.
Reddit is breaking? Of course Musk had something to do with it....
For those of you who don’t know, 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. For example, I follow subreddits focused on fitness, health, diet, renewable energy, electric vehicles, my favorite sports teams, military veterans, and several others. Reddit’s Herman Cain Awards subreddit was the source for most of my popular anti-vaxx chronicles stories.
While other social media companies struggle with content moderation, these subreddits are moderated by volunteer mods. Reddit has had to ban entire subreddits because of dangerous or illegal content, but that’s easier to do than the comment-by-comment challenge everyone else faces. 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 that link to technologist Cory Doctorow’s incredibly perceptive and influential essay on the topic. “Enshittification” is his word, and it’s a good one. Once you read it, you realize why everything good online has turned to shit.
Back to the Huffman interview:
Tech bros are truly another breed. Imagine taking a look at what Musk has done at Twitter—chased away advertisers, alienated wide swaths of his audience, pissed tens of billions down the drain, and spurred a frenzy to become Twitter’s replacement that will likely be won by Meta’s Instagram, and then think—yeah, I want some of that.
Musk bought Twitter for $44 billion. The debt service alone is $1.5 billion per year, or $125 million per month. Twitter Blue, Musk’s big idea to overcome the loss of advertisers, is bringing in about $2 million per month according to leaked internal documents back in March, and it’s doubtful the picture has improved much since then. 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.”
OpenAI and other artificial intelligence companies are using Reddit to train their chat bots. It’s legitimately a gold mine of information, and the AI companies were getting it for free. With a looming IPO and Reddit’s valuation cratering, Huffman is desperate to message his company as an AI company, hence deserving AI-levels of valuation (which are correspondingly sky-high). 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 AI companies to spend millions for its data, justifying the higher company valuation he feels entitled to.
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.
When you have to pay for moderation and community safety, yeah, it 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 consensus Twitter alternative emerges, it will bleed Twitter’s audience dry.
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 (can’t wait to see what those legal settlements cost Twitter), broken features, erratic performance, and the continued abandonment of brand advertisers.
Musk’s Twitter is not break even. Not even close. And as the article helpfully points out, “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.” So yeah, Musk has shown that even if you decimate Twitter’s workforce and refuse to pay your bills, you still can’t break even if you are a raging asshole who clearly knows nothing about actual social interaction.
Huffman is hopeless.
Twitter will literally be a cautionary business school case study for decades. It might be the case study.
Finally, the interview ends with Huffman taking a dump on the people keeping Reddit running:
JFC, 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, but then what? Are they going to have their 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 r/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 admires another guy’s gym progress.
People are gross, and 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.
In fact, the new ActivityPub standard, as well as Twitter alternative-wannabe Bluesky, are all looking at ways to enable and encourage volunteers to take over the moderation challenges.
It actually is disappointing seeing the cognitive decline of the techbro 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 Robert F. Kennedy, Jr, for president.
The whole lot of them are broken. And worse than that, they are driving what were amazing online gathering places into the abyss.
In the middle of a wide-ranging blackout by many of its largest volunteer-driven communities, Reddit CEO Steve Huffman gave what might be one of the most disastrous interviews of the year. In short? He wants to do to Reddit what Elon Musk did to Twitter.
Let’s go through this Huffman interview with NBC News, because it beggars belief.
Reddit is breaking? Of course Musk had something to do with it....
For those of you who don’t know, 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. For example, I follow subreddits focused on fitness, health, diet, renewable energy, electric vehicles, my favorite sports teams, military veterans, and several others. Reddit’s Herman Cain Awards subreddit was the source for most of my popular anti-vaxx chronicles stories.
While other social media companies struggle with content moderation, these subreddits are moderated by volunteer mods. Reddit has had to ban entire subreddits because of dangerous or illegal content, but that’s easier to do than the comment-by-comment challenge everyone else faces. 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 that link to technologist Cory Doctorow’s incredibly perceptive and influential essay on the topic. “Enshittification” is his word, and it’s a good one. Once you read it, you realize why everything good online has turned to shit.
Back to the Huffman interview:
Tech bros are truly another breed. Imagine taking a look at what Musk has done at Twitter—chased away advertisers, alienated wide swaths of his audience, pissed tens of billions down the drain, and spurred a frenzy to become Twitter’s replacement that will likely be won by Meta’s Instagram, and then think—yeah, I want some of that.
Musk bought Twitter for $44 billion. The debt service alone is $1.5 billion per year, or $125 million per month. Twitter Blue, Musk’s big idea to overcome the loss of advertisers, is bringing in about $2 million per month according to leaked internal documents back in March, and it’s doubtful the picture has improved much since then. 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.”
OpenAI and other artificial intelligence companies are using Reddit to train their chat bots. It’s legitimately a gold mine of information, and the AI companies were getting it for free. With a looming IPO and Reddit’s valuation cratering, Huffman is desperate to message his company as an AI company, hence deserving AI-levels of valuation (which are correspondingly sky-high). 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 AI companies to spend millions for its data, justifying the higher company valuation he feels entitled to.
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.
When you have to pay for moderation and community safety, yeah, it 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 consensus Twitter alternative emerges, it will bleed Twitter’s audience dry.
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 (can’t wait to see what those legal settlements cost Twitter), broken features, erratic performance, and the continued abandonment of brand advertisers.
Musk’s Twitter is not break even. Not even close. And as the article helpfully points out, “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.” So yeah, Musk has shown that even if you decimate Twitter’s workforce and refuse to pay your bills, you still can’t break even if you are a raging asshole who clearly knows nothing about actual social interaction.
Huffman is hopeless.
Twitter will literally be a cautionary business school case study for decades. It might be the case study.
Finally, the interview ends with Huffman taking a dump on the people keeping Reddit running:
JFC, 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, but then what? Are they going to have their 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 r/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 admires another guy’s gym progress.
People are gross, and 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.
In fact, the new ActivityPub standard, as well as Twitter alternative-wannabe Bluesky, are all looking at ways to enable and encourage volunteers to take over the moderation challenges.
It actually is disappointing seeing the cognitive decline of the techbro 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 Robert F. Kennedy, Jr, for president.
The whole lot of them are broken. And worse than that, they are driving what were amazing online gathering places into the abyss.