Reddit: A CEO without Integrity is Destroying What Community Built

I wonder, is it narcissism or arrogance, or greed through capitalism? but Reddit just broke CCPA and likely GDPR. I see the End.

I never intended to cover the non-science part of the science but I guess this will be the start of me writing about what I truly feel about certain tech companies and their CEOs. So, Here is the news.. Buckle up!

If you are young enough to have known and used Reddit, you should know the user u/SPEZ is also the person who is hellbent on destroying Reddit. That is the handle of the CEO of Reddit, Steve Huffman.

39-year-old Steve, started his career as a web developer and entrepreneur. He co-founded Reddit. With Alexis Ohanian, Reddit was initially ideated as the “front page of the internet”. As the outcome of this a website was launched in 2005. Initially, he was the user who would fill the front page with content, but the community grow enough that they were filling the “front page of the internet”. In 2006, reddit was sold to private investor and Huffman left the company in 2009 by resigning from the job of acting CEO.

In 2014, Huffman expressed that selling reddit was a mistake.. perhaps it was a prelude for him to be rehired as a CEO in 2015. At this time he implemented content moderation like bans for violence, offensive material etc. He was tasked to fix the mobile apps for reddit (Which are still crappy as it can get.). Huffman made site advertise-friendly. Huffman was chasing money. However, Huffman never showed immortality until the fog lifted.

Warning signs: The Sin!

As the political climate changed and Donald Trump started catching the attention of more and more users, Reddit changed. Certain subreddit became a cesspool of white supremacists and racists spreading hate. In the mean time in 2016 Huffman did something really unforgivable and unexplainable.

Huffman edited user posts criticizing him! He did not label the posts as edited but soon the eyes of the community caught on to the act. This was a big warning sign! Huffman could not take criticism. I am not a Trump fanboy but editing user data without user’s permission (not for valid reasons like changing the FoocK to F*ck to avoid profanity, he literally changed the opinions).

All of this ended up showing that Huffman had thin skin. Perhaps he was not the right material to be a public persona. The criticism got to him.

Later in 2020 Black Live Matters movement was in force. He published the letter titled “Remember to be Human — Black lives mater”. This was a great gesture that could lead the community (in theory) but it backfired. For last 4 years, certain subreddits have been the flaming pile of hatred, racism, sexism, and all other isms. Reddit has been making money off the “eyes on the platform”. I guess this was the time when the plans to “one day going public” were being made.

Reddit’s former CEO Ellen Pao called BS on Huffman’s letter. She slammed Huffman in an open post that he should have shut down r/the_donald than amplifying his voice and hatred and provocation of violence. I am a proponent of free speech but incitement of violence is not the place where I see free speech superseding. She held Huffman’s feet to the fire and called him out on “monetizing white supremacy all day long” on reddit while posturing as “in favor of BLM”.

Two mega-subreddits NFL and NBA, supported Pao’s sentiment. They went private to protest the policies. The users got to see the message that Reddit has harbored racist policies for years. They called the resignation of Reddit leadership for harboring racist content. Reddit could not make up its mind, if it is in the content moderation business — oh well, SPEZ had already modified content without permission. The Sin

Here is the audio link for what Ellen Pao had to say.

Fast forward to June-23

On May 31st, user u/iamthatis the creator of 3rd party Reddit app Christian Selig broke the news that Reddit’s new API pricing is insane and just his app will need to pay Reddit $20M per year to keep it running which is untenable. Inevitably, Apollo which is one of the best Reddit apps will shut down on 30th June 2023.

Wait Why did the API price change Suddenly?

You know from 2016 until 2023 and ongoing a lot of LLM was happening. Reddit was sitting on the treasure trove of data of 14 years of genuine user inputs. Yes, all the data from Reddit was being scraped by big giant tech companies, to train large language models.

Huffman, now looking to take the company public, was probably under pressure by the prospective investors or plain and simple evil (choose your poison), but needed to show that there is “value” to the platform. How to show the value? Show it using higher revenue, by increasing API pricing shut down 3rd party apps, so more number of mobile app users have to use the default Reddit app that sucks to be polite! The math of investment and returns was already done. And Huffman was not going to care about the majority of his communities going dark by making it private.

The war was on! The communities went private in protest, so he changed mods and forced communities to be open again. Subreddits fired back by making everyone admin/mod so he cant remove everyone and the battle continued. Once an organized cesspool of white supremacy, despite that a functional forum declined hard. Prominent users started taking their content down from reddit by deleting their accounts — and thats where Reddit F**ked up.!

Huffman Broke An Actual Law (CCPA)

Thomas Hunter II (u/nucleocide), posted a video on youtube yesterday. According to Thomas,

1. June 13th: Thomas deleted all of his Reddit posts and comments as a protest to Huffman’s shenanigans.
2. June 16th: Reddit posts reappeared without his notice
3. June 19th: Thomas resubmitted legal request to delete all of his posts under CCPA. (CCPA includes “The right to delete personal information collected from them (with some exceptions))
4. June 19th: Reddit responded that the posts must be deleted one by one
5. June 24th: Thomas decides to delete all his posts one by one. And this time he records himself doing it.
6. June 25th: Thomas rediscovers all of his posts have been restored! Including one of the posts that is personally identifiable information.

At this point it is clear that Reddit was clearly “complying” to CCPA in a malicious way by forcing user to delete each comment one-by-one. But by restoring Thomas’s account Reddit has finally pulled a straw that will get it in trouble. It has broken a law. Reddit is situated in California and it better follow it. Here is the video posted by Thomas

Now What

I think, currently, Reddit CEO Huffman is drunk on its power, doubling down on each misstep, or just unable to comprehend that it is a mistake. Invariably the way Elon destroyed Twitter, Huffman will destroy what is left of Reddit. In any case, Reddit better get their lawyers ready as this train is going the California court. I am sure that if it happened to Thomas, it has happened to many others; its just the time when all those users speak up.

Forget going public with a high valuation, Huffman might have ruined the company, the platform, and his chances to successfully lead Reddit going public.

All credits go to Everyone’s favorite activist, Louis Rossman. Most of my work was ideated from his work, then I added layers of background info etc.

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