I agree and I disagree.

I agree that on one level Huffman is a fungible element serving predictable motivations of moneyed investors. The idea that one should leverage every last cent one can for the maximization of shareholder value, this is certainly common thinking in the business world and will always have its champions among the richest and most powerful sources of investment. So in this regard I think I am in solid agreement with the two of you.

I disagree because I believe Huffman’s antics in the press have been extremely counterproductive, much more so than what you could expect from a typical CEO of a billion dollar company. If he had just taken the line from the beginning that goes ‘look, we’re ad driven, we need to become profitable, and we can no longer afford to let third parties give Redditors an ad free experience or subsidize AI training at no cost’ – this would not have exactly been popular, but it would have gone much better than they did with the hack job on Selig and the smarmy doubletalk about working with people who want to work with them. Or his patronizing dismissal of the protests as ‘noise’ that ‘will pass’, or his garbage about landed gentry and people wanting things for free, or the insecure threats about how mods will be removed and replaced if they don’t open their subs back up, or how he plans to emulate what Musk has done at Twitter. I don’t think that’s something you get no matter who’s in his place. I think most other people in his position would not have fired quite so many rounds through their own foot and in so doing, damaged Reddit quite so much. So in this regard I think Spez is an atypical case, I think he has royally screwed up, and that his idiosyncrasies aren’t doing his employers any favors at all.

I think this is an underrated point. There’s a lot of money stress out there right now. There’s a lot of people with jobs who have anxiety that they could lose those jobs. There’s a lot of Redditors who have come to see Reddit as an online home and a community that values them. All that anger and fear and stress is just looking for an outlet. And here comes the smug CEO pressing all three of those buttons at once?

And I’ll take your point one step further. Pretend it’s three months down the road, this has largely all run its course, a bunch of people have left for good, and you are one of Reddit’s primary investors. Your analysts tell you that you have lost 40% of your investment due to this debacle and that unless Reddit takes some steps RIGHT NOW to win its user base back and show the mods they’re listened to and valued again, you’re likely to lose more. These people will happily sacrifice Spez in a cocaine heartbeat under such conditions. A little public pillorying while they blame Spez for everything, a little faux contrition from the board and a promise to do better, the appointment of a CEO with some charisma and people skills who will lead some foo foo initiative to look into user complaints and do a little grandstanding – this is the playbook.

This is really the first piece in the media that I’ve seen acknowledge that, for the protesters, it’s no longer so much about the app and it’s all about Reddit’s ugly and dismissive response.

It’s like going to your boss and saying ‘There’s a problem with the working conditions and we need to make a change’ only to have your boss say ‘This isn’t an issue and I’m not going to fix anything and you’re just wanting something for nothing, like you always do… quit being such a pussy or I’ll fire you’. The complaint might have started out about working conditions but as soon as your boss goes into asshole mode, it’s going to be about what he said to your face. And that’s why at this point it ain’t going to matter what Reddit says about how this is about an app, and why it won’t matter how many ‘official spokespeople’ it runs up the flagpole to pretend that Spez wasn’t patronizing the folks who generate all his content for free and making naked threats to the mods who keep the fora running for free.

There’ll be a lot of people who will end up being too disinterested or callow to react to all this, and that’s their right. For others, Reddit was kinda a huge chunk of their day and their social existence and they don’t want to walk away from it, and that’s their right too. I don’t think this is going to be the end of Reddit so much as I think it will be seen as the beginning of the end. But there can be no question that the real problem isn’t an app anymore, it’s the scrawny-ass CEO and his weak man’s idea of how a tough man leads. Because threatening the mods isn’t a show of strength, it’s insecure weakness. Steve Huffman just doesn’t have the chops to be in his current role, let alone in charge of damage control from the protests.

The only good thing about any of this is the unintentional irony.