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Tag: Steve Huffman

  • Reddit (RDDT) Soars 12% on Bargain-Hunting, Key Execs Dispose of Shares

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    We recently published 10 Stocks Boasting 10-42% Gains. Reddit Inc. (NYSE:RDDT) is one of the best-performing stocks on Tuesday.

    Reddit extended its rally to a third consecutive day on Tuesday, jumping 12.04 percent to close at $218.48 apiece as investors resorted to bargain-hunting following last week’s disposition of shares by none other than its key executives.

    In separate regulatory filings last week, Reddit Inc. (NYSE:RDDT) said its president and CEO, Steve Huffman; Chief Finance Officer Andrew Vollero; Chief Accounting Officer Michelle Marie Reynolds; Chief Legal Officer Benjamin Seong Lee; Chief Operating Officer Jennifer Wong; and Chief Technology Officer Christopher Brian Slowe, all disposed significant shares in the company.

    Reddit (RDDT) Soars 12% on Bargain-Hunting, Key Execs Dispose of Shares

    Photo by Mohamed Hadji on Unsplash

    Huffman alone sold $7.56 million worth of shares, while Vollero disposed of $3.69 million.

    Reynolds booked $1.17 million, Lee sold $3 million, Wong disposed of $19 million, and Slowe booked $7.4 million.

    In other recent news, Reddit Inc. (NYSE:RDDT) saw its net income expand by 443 percent to $163 million from $30 million in the same period last year. Revenues jumped by 68 percent to $585 million from $348 million year-on-year, on the back of a 74 percent jump in advertising revenues at $549 million, and other revenues, which increased by 7 percent to $36 million.

    Looking ahead, Reddit Inc. (NYSE:RDDT) is targeting revenues for the fourth quarter at a range of $655 million and $665 million.

    While we acknowledge the potential of RDDT as an investment, our conviction lies in the belief that some AI stocks hold greater promise for delivering higher returns and have limited downside risk. If you are looking for an extremely cheap AI stock that is also a major beneficiary of Trump tariffs and onshoring, see our free report on the best short-term AI stock.

    READ NEXT: 30 Stocks That Should Double in 3 Years and 11 Hidden AI Stocks to Buy Right Now.

    Disclosure: None. This article is originally published at Insider Monkey.

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  • Reddit’s Human-Centered A.I. Strategy Is Fueling Its Success

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    Reddit CEO Steve Huffman says Reddit’s next chapter is about making the platform “a true search destination” built on authentic human conversation. Getty Images

    Reddit is thriving in the A.I. era, even as fast, synthetic content floods nearly every corner of the internet. The community-driven discussion site is the third most visited website in the U.S., behind Google and YouTube (and ahead of Amazon and Facebook), the company said yesterday (Oct. 30) on its third-quarter earnings call, citing Semrush’s October 2025 data. Reddit’s leaders said they’re doubling down on the platform’s identity as “for humans, by humans,” even as they use A.I. to help spark more authentic conversations.

    Between July and September, Reddit brought in $585 million in revenue, up 68 percent from the same period last year. Net income surged more than fivefold year-over-year to $163 million. The site had 116 million daily active users at the end of September.

    “As Google and other search engines grapple with issues of trust and authenticity, Reddit possesses what most A.I. companies are after: authenticated, nuanced, community-driven content,” Baruch Labunski, CEO at digital marketing company Rank Secure, told Observer.

    Co-founder and CEO Steve Huffman told analysts yesterday Reddit is doubling down on making the platform “a true search destination.”

    To that end, the company announced it’s “redesigning the Reddit experience,” focusing on a modern interface with advanced search capabilities. It will continue to roll out its generative A.I. tool, Reddit Answers, and new A.I. features will help users interpret rules unique to each subreddit and bring post insights to the top.

    Reddit said 75 million users utilized Reddit’s search functionalities each week in the third quarter, with that number expected to grow. “Reddit Answers provides users with curated, community-powered insights that are often more helpful than traditional web results,” Huffman said. “Our aim is to have a single, great search experience.”

    “Smart move toward a more ‘search-forward’ experience, but it’s still a tightrope walk,” Labunski said. “The winning strategy is to enable Reddit’s self-discovery and IP moderation with A.I., while leaving the chaotic human interactions intact.”

    Reddit continues to incorporate more A.I., specifically in moderation, translation, video and interactive features. Reddit has launched A.I.-supported moderator tools in more than 3,000 communities, with a broader rollout on the horizon. For example, moderators can use A.I. to view a summary of a user’s profile. “We’re using A.I. to make it easier for those user-written rules or moderator-written rules to be enforced automatically to make moderation more fun and efficient,” Huffman added.

    Meanwhile, Reddit’s A.I. translation now handles 30 languages, and the company is planning to expand this to drive more international growth.

    The platform recently hosted its first video AMA (ask me anything) with NASA and plans to continue expanding video in its more than 100,000 subreddit communities. Video comment replies are also expanding.

    Reddit’s advertising platform continues to see updates, and the team is currently developing interactive ads. Huffman said ads remain their “core business” and they’re continuing to roll out their machine-learning-enabled dynamic product ads, which use user intent data to inform who to show ads to.

    Reddit’s hyper-focus on search and A.I. proves the company has moved well beyond a forum site. This is “Reddit telling the market it wants to be the place where human context gets found and not just the place LLMs crawl,” Martin Jeffrey, founder of digital marketing agency Harton Works, told Observer.

    Reddit’s Human-Centered A.I. Strategy Is Fueling Its Success

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    Rachel Curry

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  • How to Start a $6.5 Billion Business At 21 Years Old: Reddit | Entrepreneur

    How to Start a $6.5 Billion Business At 21 Years Old: Reddit | Entrepreneur

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    Reddit grew for nearly two decades before going public in March at around a $6.5 billion valuation. Though the social media forum site now boasts 91 million daily active users, its success was not a certainty. In fact, Reddit’s co-founders were rejected by startup accelerator Y Combinator at the start of their entrepreneurial journey.

    “So, Alexis [Ohanian], my co-founder, college roommate at the time, he and I applied to Y Combinator,” Reddit CEO Steve Huffman told LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman on Thursday. Their initial idea was to create a way to order food from cell phones — which wasn’t the norm in 2005.

    Y Combinator rejected the idea but asked Ohanian and Huffman, who were 22 and 21 years old at the time, to work on something else. They came up with Reddit, which Y Combinator funded with a $12,000 check.

    The idea for Reddit came about from two websites: Delicious and Slashdot. Delicious was a website that let users store and share bookmarks; Yahoo acquired it in 2007. Slashdot.org still exists as a social news site covering science and tech news; Reddit’s co-founders were drawn to the community it had but wanted to expand beyond tech.

    Reddit “was kind of a Delicious plus Slashdot, but make both of them better,” Huffman said. “Honestly, I think that’s pretty much what we built. But for 19 years, we’ve been iterating on this and tweaking it, and kind of following our users and adding features.”

    Related: ‘A Huge Opportunity:’ Reddit CEO Aims to Bring AI to 1 Billion Reddit Searches

    For example, Huffman pointed out that Reddit’s “most important feature,” or the power it gives users to create their own communities, was introduced three years after launch.

    Reddit CEO Steve Huffman. Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images

    Since going public, Reddit has posted earnings that beat expectations for two consecutive quarters. The company inked AI licensing deals with Google and OpenAI earlier this year, allowing Google’s Gemini AI and OpenAI’s ChatGPT to use Reddit posts in their training data.

    Huffman said there is “a tremendous amount of opportunity” with AI.

    “I’m very proud that Reddit has played a role in the development of these technologies,” he said.

    Related: Reddit Traffic Nearly Triples in 8 Months, Posts Rise to the Top of Google Search

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    Sherin Shibu

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  • Redditors Vent Their Rage At CEO In Funniest Way Possible

    Redditors Vent Their Rage At CEO In Funniest Way Possible

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    r/place, the Reddit-based collaborative art project, is back for its third incarnation since the 2017 original. And it couldn’t arrive at a better time for pissed-off Reddit users who have had enough of the message board management’s shit. With everyone able to place only a single pixel every few minutes, it’s some collective fury that’s allowing the result to be shaping up quite so cross.

    This Brutal Gothic Metroidvania Is Shaping up To Be Something Special

    Last year, r/place saw an incredible total of 10.4 million people contribute 160 million pixels to create an astonishing and enormous piece of pixel art, 6000 x 6000 pixels big. Somehow meticulously detailed faces were created, despite the restrictions placed on any individual being able to deliberately directly draw. It was a strange and beautiful thing.

    Jump to 2023, and times at Reddit aren’t nearly so content. The introduction of charges to third-party apps caused widespread outrage, and in turn, a widespread outage, as many subreddits went dark to protest the decision. Multiple beloved third-party applications like Apollo and BaconReader have had to give up, facing API costs in the tens of millions of dollars, and users are livid. Which makes now the most peculiar moment for Reddit to think launching a new r/place might be a good idea.

    With what might best be described as “optimism,” Reddit posted the new version saying, “but hey, what better time to offer a blank canvas to our communities than when our users and mods are at their most passionate… right?”

    Er, right. The results are predictable. “FUCK SPEZ” reads enormous swathes of the picture, over and over, referring to Reddit CEO Steve Huffman, who has been particularly tone deaf in his response to the protests and anger. “There’s a lot of noise with this one,” Huffman is reported to have written in a staff memo. “Among the noisiest we’ve seen. Please know that our teams are on it, and like all blowups on Reddit, this one will pass as well.” It was hardly the message Redditors were looking for.

    Such feelings are being made very clear on the canvas. In German across the top of the image it currently reads, “U/SPEZ IST EIN HURENSOHN,” which translates to, “U/SPEZ IS A SON OF A BITCH.” Elsewhere are the more normal depictions of Pepe, some My Little Ponies, and even some Pikmin, but by far the most prominent and repeated motif is “FUCK SPEZ.”

    Honestly, it’s hard to imagine what else Reddit was thinking would happen. We’ve contacted Reddit to ask what else they might have been expecting, and whether Huffman might listen to any of this noise.

     

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    John Walker

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  • Reddit Is Removing Mods Over NSFW Protests

    Reddit Is Removing Mods Over NSFW Protests

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    Image: Reddit

    In the wake of sitewide protests, ostensibly over some API changes but really about an increasingly corporate squeeze of a historically community-run site, some Reddit moderators have decided to hit CEO Steve Huffman in the only place it seems to hurt: the site’s wallet.

    The Week In Games: Wild At Heart

    Following a disastrous round of press interviews, where Huffman came off sounding more like a Dril tweet than a company CEO and it became clear that mass blackouts were not changing his mind, mods from some of Reddit’s biggest communities decided to switch their subreddits over to NSFW (Not Suitable For Work), a toggle normally reserved for stuff like porn and, crucially, a type of subreddit that Reddit can’t show ads on, and so can’t make money off.

    Some of the communities making the switch included r/MildlyInteresting, r/TIHI (Thanks I Hate It) and r/interestingasfuck. It’s a clever move (plus it’s more legal than ransoming the company with stolen data), and one that shows the lengths mods are going to protest Huffman and his team’s actions, but it’s also one that Reddit says violates their “Content Policy and Moderator Code of Conduct”. As a result, and as The Verge report, these mods are now finding themselves “logged out of their account and locked out” by “a Reddit admin account”, and their subreddits—with millions of members—are showing up as being completely unmoderated. Those former mods have also seen their accounts suspended for seven days.

    It is incredibly funny to see the lengths Huffman and his staff are going to here. They’re in such a panic about their profit margins—and more importantly in their case, potential future share value--that they’re ignoring the fact Reddit’s entire worth is built on the back of unpaid labour. The site is literally nothing without its users (providing “content”) and mods (working for free), and Huffman is out here worried about ad revenue, from which none of those users see a cent? And sending the message that he’d rather leave whole communities unmoderated than put up with some protests?

    The internet has wrought many perils on our civilization, but the one thing it has been good for is helping publicly record just how stupid these CEOs really are.

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    Luke Plunkett

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