Reddit announces restructuring, meaning more layoffs

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Elizabeth Greenberg

07 June 2023, 12.10pm

Reddit, the social media forum, has announced a period of restructuring, according to an email sent out by CEO Steve Huffman, as seen by The Wall Street Journal (WSJ).

Of this restructuring, the company plans to lay off 90 employees, equal to about 5% of their current 2,000-strong workforce.

Further, the CEO announced they are slowing down their hiring efforts this year, decreasing their new hires from 300 to 100.

These plans are apparently in line with the company's ambition to break even this year, according to the email seen by WSJ.

The restructuring comes just months after the company declared it would charge developers for access to its API. This came in just as other companies declared their interest in pursuing generative AI, which relies on APIs for data to derive answers and human-like interaction models.

Reddit justified this move "as a platform with one of the largest corpus of human-to-human conversations online, spanning the past 18 years, we have an obligation to our communities to be stewards of this content."

Moderators and independent developers, however, are already pushing back on this move – third party apps which use Reddit content have said they cannot afford to run the premium, and subreddit communities are planning to go dark in protest.

Reddit may be making these moves to ride the wave of generative AI development and bolster their earnings. Their round of layoffs, after all, comes after a dramatic tide of layoffs across tech's biggest players, including Google, Meta, Microsoft, and Amazon.

Elizabeth Greenberg

Staff Writer

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