Whenever you see a smart person doing things that seem to make no logical sense you seek out missing information that would unlock a logical explanation. I am

Whenever you see a smart person doing things that seem to make no logical sense you seek out missing information that would unlock a logical explanation. I am curious really here about Huffman's behaviour. He may be quite incompetent (I'm judging that primarily based on the observation that changes in the web site and app sit somewhere between willful negligence and active sabotage in terms of what they have done to the user experience). But it still doesn't explain some of the completely nonsensical aspects of his decisions. I feel like there's something behind the scenes here. For example, Huffman has been told he has until September to make money or he's fired and Reddit is being sold for parts to "big LLM". Probably because there's a concrete offer on the table by some private equity or something like that which dwarfs anything they could conceivably make another way. Possibly, in an alternative (similar) theory, they have a concrete offer from a player (say OpenAI) for LLM access that would make them profitable forever, but it requires exclusivity, and these API changes are designed to get 3rd party usage down to a level that would comply with that agreement. In any of these cases he's bound by confidentially not to talk about it so he's stuck with doing what seem like crazy non-sensical things in public to achieve these outcomes.