Reddit is reportedly cutting 5 percent of its workforce | Engadget

Reddit is going through a restructuring, and according to an email by company chief Steve Huffman as seen by The Wall Street Journal, one of the moves it’s going to make is laying off 90 employees. That’s around 5 percent of the company’s current workforce with 2,000 employees. 

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

This is but one of the moves Reddit is taking in an effort to earn money: Back in April, it also announced that it will start charging developers for access to its API. The company made the decision just as the biggest players in tech got into generative AI, which is typically trained using data from the internet accessed via API. “[A]s a platform with one of the largest corpus of human-to-human conversations online, spanning the past 18 years, we have an obligation to our communities to be stewards of this content,” the company said. 

While Reddit may have been looking to earn from large companies, even independent developers are affected by its decision. Christian Selig, the sole developer of Apollo for Reddit, said it would cost him $20 million a year to keep his app running as is. Other third-party apps, such as Narwhal and Reddit is Fun, have already warned users that they can’t afford paying for Reddit’s API and will likely shut down. Dozens of subreddit communities across various topics are now planning to go dark starting on June 12th as an act of protest. Some of them plan to remain inactive for 48 hours, while others intend to stay dark permanently until Reddit addresses the issue. 

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