Steve Huffman

Cofounder of Reddit

• Born: November 12, 1983
• Place of Birth: place unknown

Primary Company/Organization: Reddit

Introduction

Straight out of college, Steve Huffman founded the social news site Reddit with classmate Alexis Ohanian, using seed money from Y Combinator. A competitor to Digg, which began around the same time, Reddit was acquired by Condé Nast Publications while Digg turned down suitors until long after its price had fallen. Huffman left Reddit in 2009, before retruning to the compnay in 2015.

Early Life

Steve Huffman was born on November 12, 1983. His parents divorced when he was young, and each parent remarried while he was still a child. His stepfather was a successful businessman. His father sparked his interest in programming by introducing him to the BASIC programming language when he was about eight years old. Huffman graduated from the University of Virginia with a bachelor's degree in computer science in 2005.

Huffman turned down a programming job in Virginia, so he and his college roommate, Alexis Ohanian, could relocate to Medford, Massachusetts. They approached Paul Graham, founder of Y Combinator and Huffman's programming idol, about funding for an idea. Graham rejected their first idea but invited them to try again. The second idea was Reddit.

Life's Work

Reddit is a social news site, which premiered in June 2005, only three weeks after Huffman and Ohanian began work on the site. Users could submit links (or text posts) and “upvote” or “downvote” other submitted links; the front page displayed the most popular stories at any given time, and the community developed around the hierarchical comment threads (also subject to up- and downvoting) attached to each story. The constantly changing display was key to Reddit's business model, because revenue was based on advertising; presenting a dynamic site rather than a static one, where every user's interaction changed the site in some way, encouraged users to stay on the site, refresh the page, and go back to another story to read more comments, all the while generating more page views (and ideally the occasional click-through).

The initial audience for Reddit came from Graham: He e-mailed friends and contacts to tell them about the site, providing the first thousand or so unique visitors. From there, the site grew organically, although Huffman and Ohanian also created a number of fake user accounts to submit news or comments in order to keep activity going for the first few months, while waiting for the user base to reach a self-sustaining critical mass. Huffman has said that he and Ohanian used “tons of . . . fake users” to submit content they wanted to read. This practice helped set the bar for the site. In the early days, Huffman and Ohanian answered every feedback e-mail personally, solidifying a sense of community. Various aesthetic choices clarified Reddit's identity compared to other sites: Huffman explained that because the emphasis was on sharing links, the headline inputted by a user became a significant part of the content. Photos and videos were therefore kept off the front page in order to keep visitors' focus on those headlines—which were uncensored.

In discussing Reddit's performance compared to Digg's after the fact, Huffman noted that Digg eventually imploded, with high-level management leaving at the same time that longtime users expressed dissatisfaction with changes to the site, but that Digg had previously outperformed Reddit on the basis of several metrics. While Reddit had a strong, loyal user base, Digg was better known to outsiders, more likely to be a familiar name to people who had never used the site. Digg was more adept at public relations, and perhaps because Condé Nast bought Reddit so early in the site's history, Digg earned headlines with buyout rumors, for which Reddit had no equivalent. At the same time, Digg was the subject of fraud actions, with users accepting pay to promote stories, something Reddit largely avoided.

After leaving Reddit, Huffman founded Hipmunk in August 2010 with Adam Goldstein. Ohanian joined the start-up, shortly before launch, as marketing director. Huffman and Goldstein had spent the preceding summer in Y Combinator's summer course. Hipmunk was an online travel company that offered well-organized flight search results, presented chronologically and ranked according to price, schedule, and Hipmunk's unique “agony” rating, based on travel duration and number of stops. The company ceased operations in 2020.

Within a year, Hipmunk was seeing more than 1 million searches per month, and Time magazine included the site in the 50 Best Websites of 2011. In 2012, the staff had grown to sixteen and venture funding had grown to $20.2 million: the initial $15,000 in seed money from Y Combinator; $1 million in seed money from SV Angel, Paul Buchheit, Matt Mullenweg, Raymond Tonsing, Amitt Mahajan, Gabor Cselle, Sizhao Yang, and Ashton Kutcher; $4.2 million in Series A funding in 2011, from Ignition Partners, Erik Blachford, Jim Hornthal, Rob Glaser, Raymond Tonsing, and Richard Barton; and $15 million in Series B funding in 2012, from Institutional Venture Partners and Ignition Partners.

In July 2015 Huffman rejoined Reddit as CEO amid a period of turmoil for the company, which had been spun off in 2011 during his absence. He quickly imposed a new content policy, clamping down on online harassment, illicit activity on the site, spam, underage sexual content, and violence and threats. However, his case-by-case policy on moderation and free speech engendered criticism for being lax, particularly after the white-supremacy rally at Charlottesville, Virginia in 2017; Huffman has maintained that repugnant beliefs should be distinguished from behavior and countered through dialogue.

Huffman oversaw Reddit's redesign in 2018. Six years later, Huffman prepared to take the company public. According to Reddit's filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission in anticipation of its initial public offering, Huffman made $193.2 million in compensation in 2023.

Personal Life

Huffman married Katie Babiarz, whom he had met in college. She was a physician and enjoyed Suduko, so Huffman wrote a program to help solve the puzzles for her. They later divorced.

Bibliography

Bot, Sophy. The Hipster Effect: How the Rising Tide of Individuality Is Changing Everything We Know About Life, Work, and the Pursuit of Happiness. Suisun City: Sophy Bot, 2011. Print.

Gusto, M. Rage Comics. Scotts Valley: CreateSpace, 2011. Print.

Jenkins, Henry. Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century. Cambridge: MIT, 2009. Print.

Morris, Kevin. “How Reddit Was Built with an Army of Fake Accounts.” 19 June 2012. Daily Dot. Web. 8 Sept. 2012. Mashable. Web. 12 Aug. 2012.

Qualman, Erik. Socialnomics: How Social Media Transforms the Way We Live and Do Business. New York: Wiley, 2010. Print. Spangler, Todd. “Reddit Discloses Finances in IPO Filing, Will Let Influential Moderators and Users Buy Shares at Offering Price.” Variety, 24 Feb. 2024, variety.com/2024/digital/news/reddit-ipo-filing-users-buy-shares-offering-price-1235919736/. Accessed 8 Mar. 2024.