Sources say Reddit's efforts to remake itself are faltering under CEO Steve Huffman and founder Alexis Ohanian's leadership as more key employees depart
It's been one year since Reddit revolted. When the company cracked down on revenge porn and subreddits containing offensive content last summer …
Context & Ripple Effects
Steve Huffman came back as CEO in October 2015 to clean up after the moderator revolt that ended Ellen Pao's tenure — his return was itself the crisis response. A year into that second act, sources say the remake is stalling: content crackdowns from last summer plus fresh policy pushes are coinciding with departures of key employees, leaving Huffman and cofounder Alexis Ohanian steering a company whose own staff is thinning out.
What makes this worth watching is how the arc resolves: nearly eight years later, Huffman had grown Reddit from $12M to $800M+ in annual revenue and 80 to 2,000 staff en route to an S-1 filing — the turnaround these 2016 sources doubted ultimately landed — though the same filings quietly wrote Ohanian out of the origin story, a schism that traces back to this era.
First-order effects
- Key employees walking out mid-overhaul directly slows the content-policy and product work Huffman and Ohanian are pushing, forcing the remaining leadership to absorb more operational load.
- With sources describing the remake as faltering, internal confidence in the post-Pao strategy becomes the binding constraint — every departure signals to holdouts that the plan isn't working.
Second-order effects
- Moderators and power users who revolted under Pao read continued executive churn as evidence the new regime is no more stable, hardening resistance to further policy changes.
- Talent losses push Huffman toward tighter centralized control over the site's direction rather than delegated leadership, shaping how the company scales its team in subsequent years.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, founder-led turnarounds at community platforms get judged less on vision than on retention — whether the second-time CEO can professionalize without hollowing out the staff and volunteer base that runs the product.
- In Reddit's case the doubt proved premature: the company Huffman rebuilt went on to file for a public listing, while the cofounder partnership itself fractured — visible in an S-1 that omitted Ohanian from the founding story.
The trend: Founder-CEO second tenures at community platforms are becoming the industry's default crisis fix, with their success measured by whether they can scale revenue and staff faster than they lose the people who built the culture.