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Reddit Laying Off Employees and Slowing Hiring Amid Restructuring 56

Posted by msmash from the tough-luck dept.
Social-media company Reddit is laying off roughly 90 employees and slowing hiring as it restructures key parts of its business. From a report: Reddit is making the moves to address priorities, including funding projects and achieving its goal of breaking even next year, Chief Executive Steve Huffman told employees in an email seen by The Wall Street Journal. The job cuts amount to around 5% of Reddit's workforce of approximately 2,000 people.

"We've had a solid first half of the year, and this restructuring will position us to carry that momentum into the second half and beyond," Huffman said in the email. He added that the company would reduce its hiring for the rest of the year to about 100 people from an early plan to hire 300.
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Reddit Laying Off Employees and Slowing Hiring Amid Restructuring More

Reddit Laying Off Employees and Slowing Hiring Amid Restructuring

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  • Not laying off anyonye (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Striek ( 1811980 ) on Tuesday June 06, 2023 @05:41PM (#63581673)

    Social-media company Reddit is laying off roughly 90 employees...

    "We've had a solid first half of the year...

    He added that the company would reduce its hiring for the rest of the year to about 100 people...

    That sounds a lot more like simply removing dead weight to me.

    • Re: (Score:1, Troll)

      by ArchieBunker ( 132337 )

      Same old story. Record profits! But we must lay people off.

      • We're in the end-game, man. Record profits quarter by quarter or the pundits and the jabberwockies devalue the company to the point where you start to lose investor faith and then it's like jumping a cliff. RECORD PROFITS OR DIE! Or maybe record profits AND die!

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by deKernel ( 65640 )

        Glad to see your reading comprehension skills are up to snuff. They are loosing money in hopes to actually break even NEXT year....there are no profits little alone record profits....*sigh*

      • I would normally share your view if Reddit was a major company with thousands of employees like Meta, Alphabet, etc but they clearly lay out: "including funding projects and achieving its goal of breaking even next year"

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Revek ( 133289 )
      If they are going to remove the dead weight they should remove the whole development dept.

    • Re:Not laying off anyonye (Score:5, Informative)

      by youngone ( 975102 ) on Tuesday June 06, 2023 @06:02PM (#63581749)
      Reddit management have decided to play chicken with it's users by charging a massive amount of money for access to the API for third-party apps.
      It a gamble for them because there are several third-party apps that are popular and vastly better than the official one.
      There is a lot of chatter about people leaving the site if the new charges go into effect, so it is possible they've killed the business completely.

      • Re: (Score:1, Insightful)

        by Anonymous Coward

        Reddit management have decided to play chicken with it's users

        No, Reddit is fucking over developers who make third-party apps that need access to Reddit's API.

        It has zero affect on anyone who accesses Reddit using a web browser. Which is what you do when you are not retarded and don't insist on doing everything on your phone.

        • Re:Not laying off anyonye (Score:4, Insightful)

          by WankerWeasel ( 875277 ) on Tuesday June 06, 2023 @07:19PM (#63581947)

          Pretty stupid for a developer to build their entire business on someone else's platform and be 100% dependent on it. Build your house on someone else's property is always a dumb move.

          • That's true. Sharecroppers are always poor.
            From what I've heard the official Reddit app is awful though. Reddit seems to be betting people will just shrug and start using it. Enough of them might go away that it makes a difference to Reddit's bottom line.
            I suppose we'll find out.

            • The most popular app has just 125k users. There are over 850 million active monthly users on Reddit. Less than 1% of active users use a 3rd party app. This is a case of a small minority being very vocal. Reddit knows that, which is why they haven't backed down yet.

              • Re: (Score:2)

                by vmcto ( 833771 )
                Now do the percentage of moderators on reddit that use the 3rd party apps...

                • You mean we'll lose the most anal-retentive, obsessive, bureaucratic, megalomaniacal and petty Redditors?

                  Why didn't Reddit do this sooner?!

              • I've seen numbers suggesting RiF and Apollo have 3 million active users between them which I would have thought Reddit would want to keep on board.
                If your numbers are correct, however then yes, Reddit will just ignore the yelling I suppose.

          • Pretty stupid for a developer to build their entire business on someone else's platform and be 100% dependent on it. Build your house on someone else's property is always a dumb move.

            Literally everything we do is built upon a service of others. If farmers decided to no longer grow crops, and supermarkets decided to no longer sell food we'd all be fucked.

            The reality is nearly every developer on the market is dependent on either a platform or software provided by others, let's call it ... operating system. No one is truly independent or unique.

            Incidentally you're criticising these developers as if reddit apps are their singular goal and primary business. In reality it's not. Most of the a

        • Which is what you do when you are not retarded and don't insist on doing everything on your phone.

          Are you from the past?

        • Except many people prefer to use Reddit other ways than though the official channels. Why? Because the standard Reddit tools suck, and the third-party developers have been way more responsive adding features to their apps. A major difference is the moderation tools available through the Reddit offerings vs third-party offerings. Large subreddits would be pretty much unmoderatable using the standard tools, so for the most part, mods use the third-party apps since they actually have powerful and useful modera

      • Reddit management have decided to play chicken with it's users by charging a massive amount of money for access to the API for third-party apps.

        It a gamble for them because there are several third-party apps that are popular and vastly better than the official one.

        There is a lot of chatter about people leaving the site if the new charges go into effect, so it is possible they've killed the business completely.

        The fact that Musk hasn't managed to kill Twitter yet tells me that established social networks are extremely resilient to copycats.

    • "That sounds a lot more like simply removing dead weight to me."

      You don't lay off dead weight. You fire dead weight.

      By definition, if they're laid off there was not cause to fire them or else they would have been fired.

  • slashdot, digg, metafilter, reddit, we've run through. ycombinator is ok but i'm not really a fan of the majority clientele.

    what website are we going to next?

  • Ugh what for?

    Do they really need that many customer service reps or ad sales people? Or what do all those people do?

    • Ugh what for?

      Do they really need that many customer service reps or ad sales people? Or what do all those people do?

      It's the same old scam. Its all about appearance. Make the company bigger because obviously bigger = more successful.

    • I never understood too, like Twitter who had 7500 employees, for a site that displays 160 characters message.

  • huh? (Score:2)

    by atheos ( 192468 )
    instead of laying off 90 and hiring 100, how about just hiring 10?

  • Good riddance (Score:3)

    by binarylarry ( 1338699 ) on Tuesday June 06, 2023 @08:48PM (#63582157)

    Reddit needs to become 2023's instance of Digg.

  • Two free adverts on the front page, come on slashdot. Reddit is essentially worthless, it's a sinking ship, it's unfixable.

    truthhurts002 [slashdot.org]: “didnt know reddit actually had employees, i thought it was just bunch of obese pedo geeks in basements”

    You're not wrong. They've actually banned the word groomer, it's ‘Minor Attracted Person’ or ‘Friend of the Playground’ /s https://tech.slashdot.org/stor... [slashdot.org]

  • A dictator would be jealous on how much freedom some moderators get in maintaining a Reddit channel.
    Free speech as in 'if I don't like what I see I ban you from my channel because I am not open to any deviant opinions or criticism on my Reddit'.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Gavino ( 560149 )
      They love to create "safe spaces" for their immature one-sided minds

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by rossz ( 67331 )

        I was perma-banned from most of the political subreddits, across the entire political spectrum. Every single one, both on the right on on the left, loved their echo chamber and did not tolerate anything that disturbed it - especially facts.

        I eventually got my account banned because I said mean things about the recently deceased pope. Saying disparaging remark about the bastard that protected child molesting priests was considered inciting violence.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by bn-7bc ( 909819 )
      Well the difference between a supreddit moderator and a dictator is that a mod can only ban you from a channel (well apart from extreme cases where they might be able to boot you of reddit) a dictator can often get you put in jail/or make your life unpleasant in myriads other ways and the only way to escape is to escape to another country, being booted t from reddit (worst case) seams rather less of a hassle while still annoying. And the freedom of speech argument is a bit thin, no private entity is obliged

  • Reddit is going to replace all employees with AI. But that's so 2023, real old school Web 3.0 thinking. The new wave is in replacing users with AI and at SCALE.

  • Owned by China (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Nocturrne ( 912399 ) on Tuesday June 06, 2023 @11:35PM (#63582382)

    After the $300mil investment by Tencent, Reddit became the largest Pro-CCP Chinese language forum, outside of China. CCP literally owns and controls many of the subreddits. The amount of anti-US misinformation is staggering. Anyone who makes a comment that isn't vigorously kissing Xi's arse gets instantly perma-banned and targeted by the 50cent army. I wonder how many Chinese users have had their account info leaked to CCP. The American founders of the company should be in prison for treason.

    • Honestly you don't need ownership for that. There's a billion Chinese people all to happy to talk up their very curated view of the world and their government. Any social network not blocked in China which gets the interest and following of the people can form pro China views, especially a place like Reddit where people can startup their own subreddits at a push of a button.

      You don't need government corporate ownership for that, just critical mass. You can see the same thing here. There's a shitton of pro-C

  • So Reddit lays off 90 people and Slashdot posts this blurb. Twitter deletes thousands of employees at the direction of Elon Musk, yet no Slashdot reference.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by King_TJ ( 85913 )

      Citation needed?

      I can't prove it and don't really feel like searching to try to find it right now.... but I'd be VERY surprised if the Twitter situation wasn't ever mentioned in a previous Slashdot story.

      • Hard to prove a negative or provide a link to the absence of an article.

        Elon Musk follows Slashdot on twitter [cnet.com] among just 68 other accounts.

        Sometimes he retweets, likes, or replies to Slashdot tweets. [twitter.com]

        Slashdot avoids posting content that would displease the person who can drive significant traffic to Slashdot via the periodic retweet. Hence, not a single mention on Slashdot of layoffs at twitter after Elon Musk took over the company.

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