I would love to see reddit succeed, but at the end of the day they have chosen to close of valuable user created information to the internet and declared they they alone possess the right to sell the stuff you freely contribute.
They are shitbags and the company deserves to burn. Bring back forums.
Reddit could slim down management as moves toward an IPO
Thomas Maxwell
Reddit is preparing for an IPO amid controversy surrounding changes to its API.
Reddit employees say the company has a bloated leadership structure with too many managers.
Staffers were told earlier this year that they'd need to do "less but better."
As Reddit prepares for an initial public offering that could come by the end of 2023, it's looking to flatten its management structure, and employees say the company has become bloated with executive- and director-level employees.
Reddit filed for IPO in December 2021, when demand for new tech stocks was at a fever pitch. It said it surpassed $100 million in advertising revenue in the second quarter of 2021. It has also made large investments in artificial intelligence, acquiring the machine-learning startup Spell in June 2022 to help customize ad placements.
Since then, demand for tech stocks has dropped. Reddit laid off 90 employees in early June as it aims to reach profitability. Its revenue growth has slowed, The Information reported.
To prepare for the intense scrutiny of the public markets, Reddit is whipping itself into shape; managers told employees in product earlier this year that the goal was to do "less but better." Part of the mandate could include slimming down middle management.
Reddit is also examining areas of its business where it could squeeze costs. It recently announced a controversial decision to charge for access to its API, or application programming interface, which enables developers to build tools that connect to Reddit. It argued that it couldn't support third-party apps that use Reddit's content but don't provide any money in return.
Insider spoke with five current and former Reddit employees, who requested anonymity as they were not authorized to speak to the press or had signed nondisclosure agreements to receive severance. They described some leadership moves and road-map changes that caused what one employee described as "thrash."
The 18-year-old social-media company has long had a culture of "trying to do too many things and doing them really poorly and not finishing them at all," the same employee said. Internally, they said, the company would now focus on "having a simplified product plan and sticking to it."
A Reddit representative declined to comment on this story and pointed to a blog post about the company's acquisition of Spell.
A flattening at Reddit
Reddit executives presented a distribution of managers to direct reports during its last quarterly leadership summit in May in New York City. The distribution showed that many managers oversee four to six people. Managers who attended the summit told employees that leadership suggested the company would in the second half of the year consolidate teams with managers overseeing fewer than six employees, two employees said.
Employees say this could mean more managers may leave through managed exits.
Reddit is not the only tech company flattening its leadership structure. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said earlier this year that the company would reduce its number of product managers and directors to make it more efficient. Meta had given managers the option to be demoted, with the expectation that many would choose to leave. Shopify has also tried to flatten its organization.
Lost trust in leadership
Reddit employees said they lost trust in leadership after a series of missteps. For example, they said they were repeatedly told before the company conducted layoffs in June that layoffs wouldn't happen.
Product road maps changed in May as the company focused on the API changes and on boosting content creation by users.
The recent change to charge for access to Reddit's API also led to protests from moderators. While many employees supported the API changes, they said Reddit's moderators deserved credit for helping grow the site. A former employee who left in April argued that company leadership should have invested more in supporting moderators and that building tools for Reddit's moderator community "has never been a priority" for leadership.
"Reddit has long had staff who have worked hard to provide a better mod experience, but the will to improve this has never come from the top, and Reddit has yet to fund them to the extent they need to," one employee said.
Illustration of a Reddit logo on a mobile phone with a laptop behind it
Reddit.
Getty Images
On top of that, Reddit hasn't been able to fully integrate Spell's technology since its acquisition, two employees familiar with the matter said. One employee described Reddit's CEO, Steve Huffman, as having pushed through the acquisition despite opposition from vice presidents and directors, as well as bringing its founders as vice presidents and directors "despite Reddit not needing more of either."
Leadership shake-ups
Reddit had some leadership changes earlier this year. Jack Hanlon, who was the vice president of feeds, AI, search, and data, parted ways with the company in March, he and the company confirmed. Hanlon led product and engineering for several areas of the company, including machine learning and data science.
In May, Reddit's head of data science, Jose Lobez, was replaced by Tyler Otto, who'd joined Reddit from Hipmunk, a travel website Huffman founded.
Three employees described Lobez's departure as a surprise, as he was well liked within the data-science organization. "He basically grew the data-science organization himself — a big cultural figure internally," one said. They described Lopez as "pretty open both with reports and about the org as a whole," adding that he "helped deal with interorganization disputes pretty well."
On top of that, Reddit hasn't been able to fully integrate Spell's technology since its acquisition, two employees familiar with the matter said. One employee described Reddit's CEO, Steve Huffman, as having pushed through the acquisition despite opposition from vice presidents and directors, as well as bringing its founders as vice presidents and directors "despite Reddit not needing more of either."
Spez's hatred for 3ed party apps being successful and LLMs scraping reddit data is clearly based on his failures and jealousy of other people succeeding.
No branch of Government should be above reproach, and to have these judges not beholden to an outside agency regarding ethical behavior is antithetical to a corruption free government. This current status erodes if not completely destroys any credible authority or respect the supreme court has.
The theoretical ideal is that judges won't be intervened by anyone. (At least that's how it is phrased in my country). Congress thus has to select trustworthy judges, and is supposed to be able to write and block laws without going to the court. These two not being met are the problems that need to be fixed, in the classical sense. Now, if you say these are beyond fixing and the other governmental branches have to start checking the court, there'll probably arise a huge problem of how to establish the independence of judges.
Basically they will be officially political tools.
Understandable but at this stage they are political tools and have been so for decades. It is just now blatantly obvious and if that is going to be the case we need a new system in place to correct it or to mitigate them
If Biden packs the court, the pubies will do the same, but worse, at their first opportunity. I have no good solutions, but impeach the shitheads seems like a good thing to do.
Yes, the SCROTUS is destroying democracy, but packing the court will only create more fights.
The GOP has already packed the courts, and Trump has already said he’ll nominate more SCOTUS judges if he’s elected. The fight is already here, but it’s entirely one-sided.
"packing the court" specifically refers to adding more justices because you don't like the current ones. the last time that the court's number of judges changed was in 1869, when it went up from eight to nine.
So, I think it's fairly safe to say, no, the republicans have not yet packed the court. McConnell, however, has definitely played some hypocritical bullshit during Obama's term, blocking nominations from being confirmed specifically to allow a republican nomination, and that probably needs to be fixed as well as adding more direct oversight and ethics rules. (and I mean rules- not "guidelines")
They will already do everything they can get away with, without worrying about the other side is doing. If the courts can be packed then they will pack them regardless of what dems do.
The legal basis was always a little shaky. The majority opinion actually coyly cites Pelosi stating that actual cancellation would require an act of Congress. The standing issue seems pretty severe and will likely have some messy ramifications going forward.
The (very) sight silver lining is that this is itself deflationary, not that that's much solace.
The legal standing was not as shaky as news media keeps telling people. The Secretary of Education has the right to modify or waive loans. Roberts acknowledged this right, but claimed that partial loan forgiveness is neither of these things, when it's kind of both.
It’s probably wishful thinking, but I could see this possibly curbing some of the entitlement people can get when using a tip-based service. And that makes for a better work environment.
Tipping is ingrained in our culture so much that people will still feel obligated to. The best way to stop it is to take the tip line off the receipt entirely.
Then it becomes a competition not in who can provide the best service to customers, but in who is able to look the best to the boss. If that means being fast and efficient, and not minding if you step on customers’ toes, then the customer experience will falter. If that means talking about other employees’ mistakes behind their back, then the workplace culture can become acidic.
Most jobs work that way. A job has a set pay, and you can get fired or promoted. Tipping is unusual: A janitor doesnt get paid a different amount each paycheck because of how clean others feel it is this week. Cashiers who help you find things in the store don’t make more that day.
Base pay has to be the same. You get merit based raised after that. How will they know who’s better and who’s worse at first? They won’t that’s why base pay is equal for everyone.
Some employees have so much experience or other skills that they can immediately ask for a higher base pay but it’s not the average experience.
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