Discover Top Posts Tagged with #steve huffman

Steve Huffman, the Reddit CEO, told NBC News in an interview that a user protest on the site this week is led by a minority of moderators an

(tweet)

#reddit refugees #reddit blackout #reddit boycott #reddit #steve huffman #he's losing it

Regarding the Reddit blackout, I find it interesting that the more I listen to Reddit CEO Steve Huffman talk about it, the more I'm fairly certain he has no idea how his business actually runs.

You have to know that 90% to 95% of the work on Reddit is done by unpaid volunteers, the moderators of the various subreddits. Reddit itself only employs about 2,000 people to run a site that 52 million estimated users. There is no way that the company could function without those moderators.

The problem is, Mr. Huffman seems to think that Reddit is a technology company. And he's right, those moderators don't build servers, they don't code backend, and they don't do any of the kind of stuff that physically makes Reddit available for users.

But Reddit isn't a technology company, Reddit is a social media company. It doesn't sell the servers or the code, the way the company makes money is by attracting a pool of users and then charging advertisers to show things to those people.

What those moderators do is allow the social part of it to happen. They moderate their forums, they take care of abusive users, they enforce topic limitations… they basically do the majority of the work that makes people want to actually USE Reddit.

Fundamentally misunderstanding what their business does seems to be a habit now among many CEOs of major companies. Maybe one day the boards that hire CEOs will figure out that knowing what a company does is key to running it. I'm not holding my breath, though.

#steve huffman #reddit #reddit blackout #ceos

The broligarchy is taking on free speech, as Reddit CEO Steve Huffman complied with personal pressure from DOGE head Elon Musk to ban hundre

Sarah Jones at PoliticusUSA:

The power of the broligarchy grows as new reporting comes out that Elon Musk, who runs a government department called DOGE and thus can be seen arguably as the government when he speaks, pressured Reddit CEO Steve Huffman on content moderation.

“Elon Musk pressured Reddit’s CEO on content moderation.

Not only has Musk been waging a months plus long campaign on his social media platform X against content posted on Reddit, but “he was also privately messaging Reddit CEO Steve Huffman,” The Verge reported today, based on sources they cite as familiar with the matter. Musk was angry that after his “Nazi” salute at Trump’s inauguration, some subreddits banned links to X (formerly known as Twitter). When that didn’t change anything, the Verge notes he “posted that Reddit users advocating for violence against Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) employees had “broken the law.” In February of this year, the BBC reported that Reddit had “temporarily banned one of its communities - and removed another - after X owner Elon Musk claimed comments made by the site's users about his employees were breaking the law.” This happened after a subreddit that posts funny posts from Elon’s social media platform “posted comments calling for violence against members of the Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency (Doge)” while “responding to reports which suggested some Doge staff have been granted access to sensitive personal information of millions of Americans.” But it turns out Reddit banned hundreds of comments that did not call for violence or doxxing, according to today’s reporting in The Verge: Shortly after the two CEOs exchanged text messages, Reddit enacted a 72-hour ban on the “WhitePeopleTwitter” subreddit that hosted the thread about DOGE employees, citing the “prevalence of violent content.” The specific threadMusk shared on X was also deleted, including hundreds of comments that didn’t call for violence or doxxing. (So far, Reddit doesn’t appear to have intervened in any moderator decisions to ban X links from the subreddits they oversee.) In other words, Elon Musk illegally took our private information and then went crying to the CEO of Reddit because people were angry about his theft of their private information. Publicly calling for violence is not okay and Reddit is a publicly traded business that can set that limit on “free speech” wherever it choses because it is NOT the government, but it is notable that there are hate reddits that appear to dox other public figures and comments plotting against children that Reddit seemingly does not take action on.

So the real issue here is not that some people called for violence, but that Reddit took action to silence hundreds of commenters who did not call for violence after the head of a government agency contacted their CEO to complain about people who were upset about him breaking into systems and stealing their private information.

[...] Musk also put on that big show of the “Twitter Files,” which got me and a few other journalists written about (shamed?) for calling out those who carried out stenography for a billionaire. One of the false narratives of the Twitter Files was that the government had “illegally coerced Twitter into censoring a 2020 New York Post article about Hunter Biden.” [...] Whatever his reasons, though, the bottom line is this is the Trump administration’s attacks on free speech. They do not respect the fundamental freedom of free speech. They do not respect what makes America great. They want to silence everyone who disagrees with them because they seek the ultimate, unlimited and unchecked power.

Petulant manchild co-President Elon Musk forced Reddit to censor comments critical of Musk and DOGE in the r/WhitePeopleTwitter subreddit. This shows that freedom of speech is eroding in America.

#Elon Musk #X #DOGE #Reddit #Censorship #Steve Huffman #Content Moderation #r/WhitePeopleTwitter #Twitter Files

It is the weekend, and no one likes working on the weekend… but Reddit seems to have no issue making their teams do it.

#steve huffman

Trending Tags

Recently Viewed Tags

#steve huffman