Mr Huffman is trying to turn Reddit profitable
Reddit CEO Steve Huffman has praised Elon Musk's handling of Twitter's finances, praising the aggressive cost-cutting and layoffs at the microblogging platform. Mr Huffman's comments come at a time when he himself is battling widespread protests over the application programming interface (API) changes on its platform.
Mr Huffman in an interview with NBC News said, "Long story short, my takeaway from Twitter and Elon at Twitter is reaffirming that we can build a really good business in this space at our scale."
He added, "Now, they've taken the dramatic road."
"And I guess I can't sit here and say that we're not either, but I think there's a lot of opportunity here," he told the media outlet.
Twitter fired dozens of its employees. Musk last year eliminated more than 3,700 jobs at Twitter, or half of the company's workforce, in a bid to drive down costs following his $44 billion acquisition.
Mr Huffman is trying to turn Reddit profitable. He said that there's one concrete area where Musk's example has been clear: job cuts.
"As a company smaller than theirs, sub-$1 billion in revenue, I used to look at Twitter and say, 'Well, why can't they break even at 4 or 5 billion in revenue? What about their business do we not understand?' Because I think we should be able to do that quite handsomely," he said.
He added, "And then I think one of the nonobvious things that Elon showed is what I was hoping would be true, which is: You can run a company with that many users in the ads business and break even with a lot fewer people."
Reddit laid off 90 employees in June.
Meanwhile, thousands of subreddits have gone dark on the app to mark their protest against the new pricing policy, resulting in millions of users being unable to see posts from their favourite community.
A subreddit is a forum or community of people on Reddit who gather to discuss a particular topic or subject. Some of Reddit's most popular communities, including r/videos, r/reactiongifs, r/earthporn, and r/lifeprotips, have announced their plans to set themselves to private on June 12.
Several developers have expressed concerns about the viability of their services under the new pricing policy.