Reddit to Lay Off 5% of Employees

As part of its restructuring, Reddit plans to lay off 90 employees, which accounts for approximately 5% of its current workforce of 2,000 employees, according to an email from company chief Steve Huffman as reported by The Wall Street Journal.

In addition, Reddit is slowing hiring this year, reducing the hiring of new employees to 100 from the 300 it originally planned. Apparently, the social network wants to focus on achieving its biggest goals, like breaking even next year. Huffman reportedly wrote in an email that Reddit has had “a solid first half of the year” and that this restructuring will allow it to “carry that momentum into the second half and beyond.”

This is just one of the moves Reddit is making to make money: In April, it also announced that it would start charging developers for access to its API. The company made the decision just as tech’s biggest players were getting into generative artificial intelligence, which is typically trained using data obtained over the Internet. “[A]s a platform with one of the largest human-to-human conversations online in the last 18 years, we have a responsibility to our communities to moderate this content,” the company said.

While Reddit may have wanted to cash in on big companies, its decision affects even independent developers. Christian Selig, Apollo’s sole developer for Reddit, said it would cost him $20 million a year to keep his app running as is. Other third-party apps like Narwhal and Reddit is Fun have already warned users that they can’t afford to pay for Reddit’s API and will likely shut down. Dozens of subreddit communities on a variety of topics are now planning to black out starting June 12th in protest. Some of them plan to remain inactive for 48 hours, while others plan to remain in the dark permanently until Reddit resolves the issue.