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Huffman seems to be drawing inspiration from Elon Musk, according to a recent interview. “Long story short, my takeaway from Twitter and Elon at Twitter is rea
by Joeri 3y ago
Huffman seems to be drawing inspiration from Elon Musk, according to a recent interview.
“Long story short, my takeaway from Twitter and Elon at Twitter is reaffirming that we can build a really good business in this space at our scale,” Huffman said.
“Now, they’ve taken the dramatic road,” he added, “and I guess I can’t sit here and say that we’re not either, but I think there’s a lot of opportunity here.”
The puzzle pieces sort of fell into place when I read that, because he's acting like an Elon knock-off. This is why they should replace him, because just like Elon is driving Twitter into the ground, the frantic Elon-like decisions of Huffman are driving reddit into the ground.
This isn't about Reddit not being allowed to make money or turn a profit or have a good IPO. The decisions made so far seem to run counter to Reddit's ability to do just that. Who will buy into an IPO of a burning platform that is at war with its own users? How do you make money from an API that's too expensive for people to pay for?
- BLKNSLVR 3y agoBut if Reddit survives this, if it's just "clearing house" for a future set of users, and, after a period of lower usage, start growing again, it will be golden; it will be seen as un-killable. Too valuable a resource to fail. As much as I disagree with the gross consumer-unfriendliness of the direction and choices of management, they're sitting on an incredibly valuable data store that will attract search results - I've read a number of comments recently that "site:reddit" is a required filter on Google these days. That's hard to kill.
- fundad 3y agoYahoo is hard to kill
- seanp2k2 3y agoAsk Jeeves is hard to kill
- JamesLeonis 3y agoDigg is still around too
- quitit 3y agoI expect reddit to survive this because this isn't something that will stop people from visiting it. While they may originally go to reddit for information, they stay for the communities. It's pretty well established that no one there reads beyond the headline before heading to the comments section. I feel the bigger threat to reddit is that many of the ways that people are introduced to it will be better served by AI-driven services. If people can find what they're looking for without ever visiting reddit, then they won't get involved in the communities, and the communities there slowly thin out. Amusingly I see part of the reason for reddit's success is how poorly Google has become at finding information on the web. These days it seems that reddit is the go to place to find answers to a myriad of problems.
- vintermann 3y agoReading between the lines, "my takeaway from Twitter and Elon at Twitter is that a trash fire is as good a business strategy as anything we can think of"
- rchaud 3y agoThe big difference is that Musk's skullduggery began once Twitter didn't have to disclose anything to public markets. Reddit OTOH is doing this en route to becoming a public company.
- morelisp 3y agoMusk also had a bone to pick with Twitter for a long time but no power until recently. The change might be dumb, but it's not unexpected. Huffman OTOH is a founder who has run the company directly or by proxy for most of its life (which is also nearly half his own life!); whatever state Reddit is in is his fault, arguably twice over since he had seemingly a blank check to restructure it again in 2014 after throwing Pao under the bus.
- weaksauce 3y agowhat's funny about him trying to be mini-elon is that elon, before that, had some credibility from landing rockets and making a "cool" ev. he burned up that social cred by being an unmasked white supremacist and edgelord that does wildly irrational stuff after taking over twitter. but hey he's a billionaire backed by saudi money so he has cash to burn and make twitter an alt-right haven... spez has never been really liked at all and his fortune(~10million) is a rounding error compared to elon's