Can you defend what you're talking about from AI, though? I imagine that is a big threat.
Look, before there was AI slop, there was slop. There was human slop. And Reddit's got plenty of it. What the Reddit platform is good at is pulling the great content out of the slop.
The AI version of this problem, it's just an extension of the same challenge we've been facing for 20 years. It seems like everyone is fighting slop these days, but this company has been fighting it for more than two decades. This week on the show, Reddit CEO Steve Huffman joins to talk about what it really takes to run one of the internet's last big communities that isn't driven by influencers. We get into Reddit's stubbornly weird culture, prediction markets, the fight against AI slop and government censorship, and where Reddit is going next as a product. But first, Ellis and I discuss the AI doomer essay that's been going viral, what its implications mean for startups and the industry at large, and how difficult it can be to actually imagine the future. This is Access.
Was that premeditated, Alex?
It was not premeditated, obviously. It just came right out. Huh.
It would have been a lot better if it had been. Well, let's roll with that.
I'm good. This is the first day in a while I haven't dramatically overbooked myself.
So I could actually serve myself up some watermelon hi-chew as a reward for making it to this point and actually read my emails for once.
Well, and your newsletter.
Can you tell what I have and haven't read your newsletter in the leadup to the episode?
For sure. But I'm surprised you're not already like Ivan, our guest last week, and just consuming email through a chatbot.
Not yet. Man, Notion is a nice company. Or it's just being back in media again, and everybody treats me nice. But I'm currently on a Slack room with one of their engineers working through some bugs with custom agents, which as a product nerd makes me feel very, very special. And I do miss that. I mean, I remember when I left The Verge, I was like, 'Are people still going to want to talk to me?' And the answer was no.
But now you're back in media, baby.
Why is everybody so nice to me? Oh, yeah. I mean, it was always just very ironic to me like how nice people were to me given how little I was paid. I'm like, there's no one making $40,000 a year writing media that should have this much influence with that type of compensation.
It is the only job in the world where you simultaneously make so much less than everyone else around you and you also do not ask the other people around you for money. It's a very unique job in that sense. It's like I'll often be in the room with whatever, you know, Masters of the Universe type folks and it's like, 'Oh, literally everyone here just wants each other's money and even though I'm the brokest of all of them, like they still want to talk to me because I'm not just with my hand out,' you know?
Please, sir, may I have some dollar pizza? That was me in New York City in 2011.
Yeah. I mean, I will caveat that unless we're talking about how, you know, premium brands can align with the Access podcast, then my hand is certainly out. But otherwise, yeah, man, it's good to have you back in the media world. And we did get great feedback on the episode with Ivan, CEO of Notion last week. Please check that out if you're new to the show. And leave us reviews, please. Help us with those podcast charts and watch us on YouTube. I feel like I have to be so relentlessly self-promotional now that it kind of kills me inside. But I guess that's the name of the game, right?
Indeed. And getting into this week's news of interest, it's honestly it's tough to tell. I mean, there's this post by Satrini Research about the future of AI that's been going viral.
Satrini, there we go. I'm rubbing off on you. Yeah. But it's honestly like tough to know because it is such a monoculture within the X algorithm where it's like, do you like Knights of the Seven Kingdoms? I shall show you the same GIF 18 times and not just over the course of today, but in a row cuz you like it that much. And then I saw a hundred instances of people talking about this piece which on the one hand can be helpful to see what everybody's saying. But on the other, Twitter just is not a way to find out what is actually happening anymore. With the exception of one topic per day.
I think it has broken out from the echo chamber. It's got 20 million views on X in less than a day. The Substack post is going mega-viral as they say. Crinier research.com. The title of this is the 2028 global intelligence crisis. By the time this episode comes out, you'll have definitely heard about it. It also moves stocks. DoorDash stock went down. A bunch of other stocks went down. And the entire premise of this essay, it's not like they have some crazy new insight, right? That's like we found out that these companies are going to zero because of AI. It's purely a I don't know what you would describe this. You're more of a writer, Ellis, but it's an imagined world in 2028 kind of writing as if you know you're able you're peering into the future where this financial firm is explaining the global economic fallout of agentic AI that has accelerated on the trajectory it's on right now. I think what resonated with everybody is just playing out the scenario of our current system where a lot of people feel like they are already getting squeezed either by corporations or capitalism at large or just the United States being 300 years old and starting to show its cracks. You could call it enshittification, you could call it extraction. There are a lot of different ways to talk about this, but I think what this piece is showing is that AI is just really only going to accelerate that. And I think one example it talks about is kind of like the entire B2B SaaS sector and technology essentially existing as a way to like sell tools to people who can't build them for themselves. What happens when people can build these tools for themselves? The entire sector kind of collapses. And I don't know, man. I was getting a bit spooked reading this.
No, not yet. I'm on Man, I'm on all those Vanguard 2055s, assuming the world still exists.
Long baby. Yeah. I mean, I was thinking a lot about actually what Ivan was telling us last week when I was reading this. I think his quote, which has gotten a little bit of pickup, and I think other founders I've talked to have gone like, 'Oh, wow.' he, you know, he articulated that well was if your product is not set up to be traversed by agents, you're going to be in for a really hard time was, I think, almost exactly how he put it. And so, how Notion is opening up as a developer platform and as a way for agents to interact with its data ahead of even an IPO, he knows that this is the eventual end state of companies like Notion, software businesses. And I think Dylan Field at Figma honestly has this very similar view. I would say two of the more plugged in product-minded still, you know, young founder SaaS CEOs that I think are, you know, are understanding the cutting edge, saying similar things. And so I think that's advice that's probably worth taking to heart and digesting a bit, especially with an essay like this.
Well, you like my shower thoughts. Thank you for humoring them. I had a good one this morning. Well, a scary one. I was just thinking what percent of companies setting aside the founder who sets the direction. What percent of actual white collar work is trying to come up with strategic solutions to problems and just simply getting the team aligned around them using best practices and with people without usually a source of truth that people refer to or even remember on any regular basis. It seems to me that a lot of that stuff can be automated by agents that know the best practices that come up with their strategic point of view and can execute it dramatically faster. And I think it's just scary, man. I mean, I think what it leaves, and I've had a handful of clients in the creative space trying to talk about like AI and creativity, and I've come to believe this idea myself, is that one of the things that will be the scarcest will be the outcomes of our own unique lived experiences, whether we turn them into art or products or fashion or services or games. And that's something that like AI almost by definition cannot do, especially when people so genuinely appreciate the story, the personal story behind something. But yeah, man. I mean, this post was all about just like white collar collapse. And a lot of the logic of it seemed kind of sound to me.
Yeah. For a lot of these jobs that just largely boil down to like best practices, execution, and coordination.
Yeah. Or does that sound crazy?
No, I think that's totally right. There was my favorite line was, 'It should have been clear all along that a single GPU cluster in North Dakota generating the output previously attributed to 10,000 white collar workers in Midtown Manhattan is more economic pandemic than economic panacea.' It's like, yeah. And also it's just this very I guess basic human insight that humans spend a lot on discretionary goods and things that are not quote unquote logical or necessary. And guess what? Robots have zero need for discretionary spending. So what happens to the rest of the economy that is so reliant on upper middle class white collar quote unquote knowledge workers spending on all these things? If their wages plummet because they're out of, you know, work and AI, you know, doesn't give a shit about your vacation business, what is that going to do? The ripple effects just seem pretty extreme if you buy the logic of this article.
I mean, we certainly have not felt the impact of agents, even if they are just B or B+ agents working not just faster traditionally, they don't need a lunch break to go to the bodega. I guess you said last episode, Alex, you only take a 5-minute lunch break. So you're still at pace with the agents here. However, you still have to sleep, don't you?
I go to sleep, but you know,
You don't have that edge anymore.
Well, yeah. I mean, there's an argument to like, you know, if I have 10 agents at all times or infinite number that can do things for me in parallel, that is going to replace jobs. There's just no way it won't because that's activity that would have either been done by me or I would have hired out to someone else, an assistant or whatever. And if these agents actually work like that, which I don't think right now they're reliable enough. Shout out to the Meta AI executive who accidentally had Open Claw delete her entire work inbox. That was another viral X post the other day that I saw. So these things aren't quite reliable enough, but you know, when they get there, and it seems like they will at the rate they're going, yeah, man, people are totally going to be out of work.
One of the quotes I liked from this piece, the economy can find a new equilibrium. Getting there is one of the few tasks left that only humans can do. And then of course the kicker at the end saying it's not too late. Quote, 'The canary is still alive.'
It's weird though, dude. I mean, another quote from this that said, 'Every decision was rational but altogether catastrophic.' I mean, I work with hundreds of companies and they're all just kind of bright-eyed young people trying to say, 'Hey, I worked in this industry and it freaking sucked.' And I'm going to have AI make it better. But as soon as all this stuff becomes digital, yes, it allows for hopefully more pay, more efficiency, but then down the road when everything gets marketized, turned into a market where anything can be bought and sold, that's kind of the final outcome. And then it bites people back in the butt. And it seems that AI is just going to kind of take that to the next level. And few seem to have the ability with the exception of maybe Dario and this piece to actually play some of this stuff out. Have you seen others who've like written kind of visiony posts with specificity?
No. And I think what it showed me is that it is really worth sitting with the potential ramifications of the things we understand, even just you and I. We're not like experts on this stuff by any means, but I think we do have an unusual level of access, no pun intended, to the people building this stuff. And I am so just kind of tunnel vision on what I do day-to-day. I don't know how you feel about this, but I don't really spend a lot of time actually abstracting out the implications of what I'm seeing up close, you know, a year from now.
Yeah, you don't have kids yet.
Well, yes, that there's that, but just even the technology, I'm like, selfishly, it's like, damn, like we could probably make some money if we actually thought this through, right?
Oh, yeah. I mean, we're certainly the lucky ones who have some scarce asset, whether it is, you know, experience or connections that we can find more ways to monetize in a way that's good for us and our families. But for the vast majority of people is just quite a different equation, I think.
Anything else going on for you this week? I was going to go to New York and I canceled that trip due to blizzard and I'm very glad that I did because the weather is glorious this week as it always should be in LA. But yeah, anything else top of mind for you?
Man, I'm just glad I'm not dealing with like the New York weather hysteria. I found that just like so grating every other week in New York City. I guess that was the old Twitter days as well.
It's kind of fun. I kind of miss like there were a couple blizzards I remember when I lived there and yeah, it's insane and intense, but it's definitely a memory, you know.
Well, that's because you're a true reporter, whereas I am not. I think media people like to catastrophize.
I just like to yap. Otherwise, I'm speaking of yapping, I'll be at the Upfront Summit in LA this week, yapping away with all the VCs and tech people and talking to some potential future guests for Access.
What's on your YAP agenda?
My YAP agenda, I'm chasing some scoops for sources. I can't reveal the moment, but I think one will be out. One is in the chamber. I was actually on TBPN last Friday talking about some of this. Shout out to John and Jordy for having me on at the Ultradome. We were talking about the art of scooping and as I said then I've always got, you know, something in the scoop chamber. It's just a matter of timing, you know.
Have you ever double scooped, taken the source to Jenny's and gotten the scoop while getting the scoop?
Yeah. Or you just do a scoop at a time, but the cone is full and it's like, you know, I've got a you know, we can keep this metaphor going. But yeah, I'm kind of in that position right now, which is just a rare treat. You know, it's like when you get the triple stacked cone, it's like, man, I really am treating myself. I guess at this point, since we haven't already, we should say who our guest is this week. We have Steve Huffman, the CEO and co-founder of Reddit. Reddit is obviously a very important company. Ellis is a DAU and I am a probably weekly user, but I think Reddit has played a big part in both of our internet lives over the last 15 or so years. I've definitely fixed a router or two through it. I think as we find out in the interview, maybe thanks to you without knowing that. And I like Steve. I've known Steve for a while. You'll hear in the interview, we were just at a dinner together a few weeks ago and Steve is always good at actually sharing his opinion, which is increasingly rare as a public company tech CEO and not being afraid to give his take and I think he did that with us. But yeah, really appreciated him coming on. What do you think of Steve?
Yeah. Well, I think what's interesting and kind of lovable to me is that they've just kind of found this niche. I mean, they're making a lot of money. They're a public company now, but they are by no means a three billion user company like some of the others out there. And I think for a long time, people have had this idea that as a social or community platform, you either go boom or you go bust. And it seems like they've carved out a really nice place for themselves where they're making good money and able to actually certainly in part thanks to having the founder still there, keep some ethics and morals going of some kind even if you don't agree with them as they go about their daily lives making this thing. So yeah, it was fun to dig into that and more.
And a CEO who appreciates shit posting which is also increasingly rare these days. Got to love it.
I don't know if we want to encourage that because people think they're good at it and then they're not and then it's super cringe.
Yeah, it's an art form. Don't do it unless you're really sure you're good. All right, we'll kick it to Spaz. How about that?
Hey, Steve. How you doing?
Great. Doing great. What's been top of mind for you since we last saw each other? It was just a few weeks ago at that dinner you guys had. You guys had earnings.
Did we have earnings? Oh, yeah.
It was the evening before earnings. And you know what? This is actually a great place to start. I've done this long enough to where I can tell how the management team feels about earnings based on the vibe of like the press event right before. You guys were feeling pretty good.
I was going to say the quality of the appetizers are usually a reflection of how earnings went.
Could tell you guys were feeling okay about the quarter and it was a good quarter.
Yeah, it was a good quarter. I think happy with the results. Honestly, almost every earnings has felt the same. And honestly, almost every one of my board meetings has felt the same. I'd say like 90% of them are feel good about the work we did. There's always more to do.
So that sounds like neither an up vote or a down vote on board meeting, just kind of neutral.
Well, I actually love my board meetings. Love my board meetings. It's just that our mentality is always I think it's almost always the same. We did a lot. I'd like to do more. We got a bunch of stuff to do. It's pretty much the same pattern.
It's better than a treadmill. Running on treadmill is torture. This I actually enjoy this.
You've been at this for a while. I mean, 20-ish what years? Do you feel like you have another 20 in you?
I don't have any other plans. It's hard for me to imagine 20 years in the future, especially these days.
Yeah. But that has nothing to do with Reddit.
During my time at Reddit, I had five years not at Reddit, right? So I was with Reddit for the first five years, then I was gone for about five. I've been back for the last 10. So I've had a taste of life not working at Reddit. And I prefer working at Reddit. It's a cool job. We get to do a lot of interesting things.
And you get to do press dinners with Alex, which what does that even entail?
You know, just kibitzing about our industry. It's not the worst way to spend an evening.
It was great. Yeah. Also, you said something wild about prediction markets. Can you repeat it here on the pod?
Oh, I was wondering what Okay. What did I say?
You think the CIA is running prediction markets?
Did I say that? Doesn't sound like something I'd say. Sounds like some crazy ass redditor.
We were talking about it and you know, it's a thing that I it's a kind of conversation I'm having a lot with founders. Everyone is so fascinated by prediction markets and I just interviewed Chris Best at Substack about their integration with Poly Market. I'd be curious to actually know yeah how is Reddit thinking about that space? Is that something you guys want to do partnerships with or how do you feel about it?
You know it's interesting before prediction markets, you know, Poly Market and Kalshi, you know, existed, we thought of Reddit as a prediction market and I still think of it this way, right? You can kind of get a sense of where things are going by looking at Reddit. Now sometimes it's more direct and other times I think it's, you know, interpreting, you know, reading tea leaves a bit. I don't know to me it feels like we're still figuring out where they fit in society. They are in many cases, I think, better at reporting the news than the news. The best example, right, is like the presidential elections. If you just want to know where things are trending, it's so much faster to just look at the graph than to read some, you know, cope from a reporter on election night. But there's other areas where, you know, things are more complicated like sports is one. I guess any area where the better has agency seems to be problematic.
Or there's the specific like Maduro gets captured at X time and you know maybe the CIA slips and informs, you know, a little bit of the take on a prediction market and maybe you've got a weird thing happening there.
There's so many opportunities for insider behavior.
Yeah, we've seen this in the prediction markets. We've seen it in crypto. And we can come up with less conspiratorial examples, right? Let's say somebody's thinking about running for governor in California and so they can just go place a bet on will they run for governor in California or that Super Bowl producer or whoever that was who keeps winning bets on what the first song's going to be. That definitely happened. And if you're telling me like college basketball players aren't missing free throws to make a few bucks, like that's got to be happening.
Well, it strikes me as interesting though. I feel like Steve, you're the leader of one of these communities that has probably done the most independent research of any other community. I feel like Reddit was always the place where if you aren't checking Consumer Reports or where someone is going to post a leak or where somebody with a million karma is going to share the inside story on something, I feel like it's always been a great place for that. And I guess when we talked to the CEO of Kalshi, he was just talking about this as a way for people to essentially turn that research into something that they can actually make money off of.
The positive way to describe these things is it's people putting their money where their mouth is, right? And so there's a lot of valuable information there. So, I mean, if there is separation between the I don't know what they call them. They probably don't call them betterers, but I don't know if you can really call them investors. So I'm going to call them a better. So, if there's some separation from the better and the outcome, I think it's really, really powerful. It's when the better has agency over the outcome that it's corrupt or not. I mean, is it? I mean, I think it is, but the thing is the platform's revealing the information, right? You can see where the money is.
Like where the money is is actually most likely to happen probably more than any other polling system.
Yeah. I mean, insider trading is a huge thing. And also how disputes get resolved is a big issue and how, you know, if it's not as clear-cut as yes or no, what happens? Those two things I don't think these markets have figured out at scale. So, it sounds like you're more of like a wait and see on if that makes sense in any kind of product layer for Reddit.
I think the way we'd approach anything like this and this is the way we thought about it is let the users build it. So, we have the developer platform on Reddit which lets you build, you know, basically apps within Reddit. Today it's mostly games plus some moderation tools. Like one of the first ones that was built was polls. And so prediction markets are like super polls. But we don't have money flowing through it. And that's I mean so that's where these prediction markets need to be, you know, they have to get regulated or I don't know script the law or whatever. That's we're much much more conservative in those things like we don't want to be tied up in those conversations. But I think there's so many interesting things that can be done on Reddit because Reddit provides distribution and lots of people with lots of viewpoints. That's why we built the developer platform is to let users do interesting things where there's lots of users. But like the impetus for developer platform I mean one of the big ones at least was like r/Place which was the April Fool's game. We've run it a couple times now, right? A bunch of users create, you know, a work of art in my opinion, at the same time collaborative.
And so, but anyway, things like where you need lots of people participating at once. That's what Reddit does. This brings lots of people participating in the same area. So, you could do predictions. But in a sense, all of Reddit's predictions. I'd be a little sad as a longtime Reddit DAU representing in the room here if it got too overtly like prediction market-y or monetization because I feel like Reddit is one of the only remaining places on the internet where there's some altruism with why people post and I feel like that's part of the mistake that every other platform has made in terms of community building is that they've made everything so likable, monetizable, everybody becomes their own brand. I mean, obviously it's not fully anonymous. It's about pseudonyms. People get cred within their subs and whatnot, but I really enjoy that aspect. And so I'd be a little scared if it got a little too commercial.
Like one of the important things about Reddit is if you're good at Reddit, it doesn't help you in the real world. You're just good at Reddit. You got a bunch of Reddit karma that you can't do anything with. Nobody gets famous or rich in the real world for being, you know, good at Reddit. And that in hindsight, I think is a really important quality of Reddit, which is you're just there because you enjoy doing it or you want to do it or it's fun or helpful or whatever. So we'll leave the influencers to the other platforms. We don't ever want that. But there's a line and this is one we're trying to figure out how to walk, which is around creators. And so we spend time thinking about what's the difference between a creator and an influencer because Reddit loves original content. But then Reddit doesn't like self-promotion.
And so I but I always ask like okay well where do you think original content comes from?
I think they can be the same thing but influencer if you want to take it literally I think maybe you're trying to influence people over things that have already been created whereas a creator is literally creating from net zero. And maybe the influencers come in around that content or amplify it or maybe that's a way to think about it.
I guess influencers maybe their main product was themselves maybe disproportionately versus creators. I don't know.
Yeah, I think those are both helpful ways of articulating it. I mean creators create and so there should be some artifact, right? I made some art. I wrote this thing. I made this video. Now obviously influencers do that as well, but that's good behavior, right? I think if you're contributing, if you're creating content that people like, that's what people want. People want the content. But then the line gets fuzzy, right? You could be an artist who does like brand promotions. It gets fuzzy pretty quick.
Well, this is the thing you've talked about a lot recently, too, is Reddit has this just very strong anti-promotional culture, right? And I think publishers have felt this over the years. We were talking about this at dinner, like I think publishers are scared of Reddit because they've experimented before and then they just get, you know, absolutely destroyed in the comments for trying to promote their work. And it's just this instinctual kind of anti-brand, anti-promotional part of Reddit that you have to figure out with that, right?
And at the same time, huge amount of content on Reddit is links to publisher content. Like at one point when we started Reddit, that was 100% of the content. So the irony if you're a publication or you're a journalist or an author of something and you write something that the Reddit community will like and you submit it yourself, you'll get chased out of town. But if somebody else submits it on your behalf, it's welcomed. And then if the author shows up and talks about it, that's celebrated. It's like, oh my gosh, the author's here. And so it's really important that we for many reasons land the plane like figure out how do you get the content whether it's professional publisher content or artwork or whatever in Reddit hopefully by the creator giving the creator credit letting them sit there and enjoy the conversation with their fans or the consumers in a way that feels great but there's really there's a lot of emphasis on like feels great #authentic Steve, right? But a lot of Reddit is feelings in that way.
Yeah. Well, I mean, so Ellis and I both worked at the kind of early I would say web 2.0 publishers, BI and The Verge, especially in the kind of mid 2000s where, you know, the chart beat would be up in the office and, you know, we would randomly get, you know, a big subreddit would link to one of our stories and it was just I don't know if you remember this Ellis, but it was just this like Reddit bump. The Reddit bomb. I forget what we called it. It was just like, you know, miracle from on high, just fire hose of eyeballs. But it was so random and so unpredictable because we weren't promoting it ourselves. And it would be like way even earlier than that. I remember like when Delicious would link something and it was just like, oh my god, like the servers almost coming down on this blog I work for because of that. And you all still have that distribution. You still have those eyeballs. How can you fan that out and get creators to see that? I guess is it sounds like a huge challenge.
