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. 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. 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). 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. The company is currently valued at $10 billion. 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. 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 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. 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. 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. 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.Īlong with his Reddit co-founders, Huffman helped define the 21 st-century internet-for better and for worse, and with the help of figures who’d later become tech overlords in their own right. As CEO, Huffman has courted controversy with many of these moves, both within and beyond the freewheeling platform. 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. 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. Steve Huffman has tussled publicly with Reddit’s users before, and he wants everyone to know it.
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