Reddit To Axe 5 Percent Of Workforce

American news aggregation and message board website Reddit has confirmed it will be making layoffs and reduce its hiring in 2023.

Bloomberg reported seeing an internal email from CEO Steve Huffman, in which he confirmed the restructuring will include job losses.

Reddit’s announcement of job losses mirrors other businesses in the tech space cutting thousands of jobs, amid the uncertain global economy.

Job losses

In the memo on Tuesday, CEO Steve Huffman reportedly confirmed that Reddit will lay off about 5 percent of its workforce, or 90 employees.

The firm has approximately 2,000 full-time employees.

In addition to this restructuring, Huffman also reportedly stated that Reddit will reduce its hiring for the rest of the year to about 100 people from an early plan of 300.

Reddit is best known as a social news destination, where it combines news reports with messaging boards, to encourage discussions among online users.

With more than 430 million monthly active users and over 100,000 active communities, it’s ranked among the most popular social networks worldwide.

Indeed, over 25 percent of US adults are said to use Reddit.

It has approximately 52 million daily active users, which is massively up from from 2020, when Reddit only had around 36 million daily active users.

Reddit was founded in 2005 by Steve Huffman and entrepreneur Alexis Ohanian.

IPO announcement

Reddit experienced a surge in appeal due to the popularity of WallStreetBets and other forums on its platform, that have become a venue for retail investors to speculate on stocks.

Its messaging boards were extensively used by financial traders in 2021 during a clash between small-time traders and big financial institutions on Wall Street, over entities such as GameStop and Robinhood.

Later in 2021, Reddit filed for an initial public offering (IPO) in the United States, although since then there has been no announcement about any IPO launch date.