Steve Huffman on why AI won't kill Reddit
Reddit's CEO on fighting slop, AI deals, being a better platform for creators, prediction markets, and more.
Happy Thursday. What an action-packed day of tech news. It has great seeing some of you here at the Upfront Summit in LA. Today I’ve got this week’s ACCESS episode with Reddit CEO Steve Huffman, along with some notable AI news and info about what I’m doing at SXSW next month.
“Before there was AI slop, there was slop”
Even with all the fear swirling about AI eating software, Reddit CEO and co-founder Steve Huffman seems calm about how the platform will fare in a post-agent world.
Helping fuel that confidence is the fact that, after a rollercoaster two decades, Reddit appears to be on a real upswing. The company recently posted its best quarter ever: $726 million in Q4 revenue, up 70% year over year, with $252 million in net income and 121 million daily active users. Reddit also continues to play a critical role as one of the most cited data sources for AI models. “Before there was AI slop, there was slop,” Huffman said. “The Reddit platform is good at pulling the great content out of the slop.”
In a wide-ranging conversation, Huffman laid out how Reddit’s AI data licensing deals with Google and OpenAI are evolving from transactional data-for-dollars arrangements into deeper partnerships, and how it’s fighting AI slop with what he’s calling “ass in seat” human verification. He opened up about prediction markets, Reddit’s complicated relationship with creators and self-promotion, and why he thinks that the platform’s core value is durable in any version of the internet, including one dominated by AI.
He was also characteristically direct about the Australian government’s under-16 social media ban, which Reddit is suing to overturn, arguing that it effectively restricts soon-to-be voters' access to the most popular sources of news and information. And he shared that, while Reddit is looking to acquire other companies, he’s not thinking about chasing a bigger merger for the sake of more scale.
Catch the full conversation on this week’s episode of ACCESS, the podcast I co-host with Ellis Hamburger:
Huffman is one of the few remaining founder-CEOs from the early internet era, having co-founded Reddit in 2005 at 21. He sold it to Condé Nast for $10 million, left for five years, and returned as CEO in 2015 during a period of crisis. He took the company public in March 2024, and Reddit crossed $2.2 billion in annual revenue last year.
Highlights from the interview:
Reddit’s AI deals are evolving from data-for-dollars to deeper partnerships: Huffman said Reddit’s thinking on its Google and OpenAI licensing agreements has shifted. The original framing was transactional: cash in exchange for training data. Now, Reddit evaluates these deals based on whether they advance Reddit’s core mission of helping people discover the platform, find their communities, and have better experiences. “We have a really healthy business model,” Huffman said. “If it’s not helping Reddit’s flywheel go faster, it’s not that interesting to us.” He added that with companies Reddit hasn’t reached terms with, “the goalposts are moving” in terms of expectations.
Fighting AI slop with “ass in seat” verification: “The assumption on Reddit is everybody you’re talking to is a person.” He said about 95% of content submitted to Reddit gets removed as spam even pre-AI, and the platform is now layering human-verification checks, leveraging passkeys, Face ID, and Touch ID, to confirm there’s a real person directing activity even if they’re using an AI agent. He called this “ass in seat” verification: not just proving a human registered the account, but that a human is sitting in front of the computer right now. At the same time, Reddit isn’t going to block agents from the platform, as long as they’re labeled. “I don’t think we can say no agents,” he said. “We’ll have to take this one step at a time.”
He wants Reddit to be a better platform for creators: Huffman acknowledged one of Reddit’s oldest and strangest tensions: if you write something great and submit it yourself, you’ll get chased out of town, but if someone else submits it for you, you’re celebrated. Reddit is building “Reddit Pro,” a non-community space for creators and publishers to post content that communities can then pull in, with clear labeling and transparency. The goal is to welcome original content without triggering the platform’s deep anti-promotional antibodies.
He’s interested in prediction markets but doesn’t seem interested in a partnership: Huffman said Reddit has always functioned as a kind of prediction market in terms of sentiment, but he’s not rushing to build one into the platform the way Substack integrated Polymarket. His concern is the “agency problem,” when bettors can influence outcomes, and he pointed to everything from college basketball players potentially missing free throws to Super Bowl producers winning bets on halftime songs. Reddit’s approach is to let developers build tools like this through its developer platform rather than baking it into the core product.
Listen or watch wherever you get podcasts.
Elsewhere
Jack Dorsey’s Block layoffs are the canary in the coal mine. The largest proportional reduction in force for any S&P company in history is being attributed to AI, and it sent the stock up by double digits. That just gave cloud cover for a bunch of other CEOs to do the same thing.
Anthropic says no to the Pentagon. This response from CEO Dario Amodei shouldn’t really be a surprise if you read his recent essay, in which he described “using AI for domestic mass surveillance and mass propaganda” as being “bright red lines and entirely illegitimate.” Anthropic employees are flooding X to say how much they appreciate the company declining the Department of War’s ultimatum, though it sounds like there is some nuance to what is being negotiated that the public doesn’t fully understand.
Google is coming for Nvidia. First, there’s this report from The Wall Street Journal saying that “Google is increasing its financial support to a network of data-center partners that can provide computing power to a broader swath of customers.” And today The Information reported that Meta has signed a multi-billion-dollar deal to use Google TPUs. As Jeff Bezos famously said, “your margin is my opportunity.”
Perplexity is making moves. Yesterday’s “Computer” agent launch was ambitious. Today the company announced a deep partnership with Samsung for its new S26 phone, which includes being pre-loaded with a dedicated wake word. “Perplexity is the first non-Google company to have OS-level access in a Samsung phone,” according to CEO Aravind Srinivas. However you feel about Perplexity, that’s an impressive feat.
I’m coming to SXSW
I’ll be part of a panel about why taste and curation matters more than ever in the age of AI. It’s a topic that I’ve been thinking a lot about as I’m build this newsletter and the podcast. Catch the talk on March 15th at Superhuman’s space at Antone’s in Austin.
Conference badge holders can also attend a March 17th interview I’ll be doing with Tencent’s Yong-yi Zhu, who oversees the company’s portfolio of about 20 gaming studios. Tencent executives rarely do interviews and I’m excited to speak with Zhu.
This week in Sources
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