Steve Huffman

Steve Huffman, who posts under the username 'spez', is the co-founder and chief executive officer of Reddit. Born in 1983 and raised near Warrenton, Virginia, he met Alexis Ohanian as a roommate at the University of Virginia. The two pitched a different idea to Paul Graham's Y Combinator in its first 2005 batch; Graham steered them toward building Reddit, which launched in June 2005 and was sold to Condé Nast in 2006. Huffman left in 2009 and co-founded the travel-search company Hipmunk before returning to Reddit as CEO in July 2015, succeeding interim chief Ellen Pao.

In November 2016, Huffman became the subject of a trust controversy after he used his administrative access to secretly edit user comments in the pro-Trump subreddit r/The_Donald, altering insults aimed at him so they appeared directed at the subreddit's moderators instead. He acknowledged the edits, writing that Reddit's community team was 'pretty pissed' at him and that he 'most assuredly won't do this again,' and apologized publicly. The incident, surfacing amid the 'Pizzagate' conspiracy activity on the platform, drew criticism that a CEO covertly rewriting user posts undermined the integrity of the site.

Huffman's most consequential controversy came in 2023, when Reddit announced it would begin charging for access to its data API, which had been free since 2008. The new pricing forced the shutdown of popular third-party apps such as Apollo, whose developer Christian Selig said the costs were unsustainable, and threatened moderation and accessibility tools. Moderators organized a protest beginning June 12, 2023, taking thousands of subreddits private; an estimated 8,500 communities went dark. On June 13, The Verge published a leaked internal memo in which Huffman told staff that, 'like all blowups on Reddit, this one will pass.'

The memo, together with Huffman's characterization of moderators as 'landed gentry' who 'get there first' and pass control to their successors, intensified the backlash and prompted more than 5,000 subreddits to extend their blackout indefinitely. Huffman maintained the protest had no significant revenue impact and did not reverse the API policy. He subsequently led Reddit through its March 2024 initial public offering, after which he remained CEO of the publicly traded company.