In 2020, Reddit was the epicentre of the /r/WallStreetbets short squeeze on hedge fund managers, using the Robinhood app. The updates to design and harassment seem to have been critical to Reddit’s two recent funding rounds, the most recent valued the company at $6 billion. This sparked pushback by Redditors, so web users are able to reset the design to the older version. Reddit also updated its website and app, updating it to fit with the design trends of the past few years. For the first 10 years of Reddit’s existence, it allowed third-party developers to build apps for the website, but in the past five years it has dedicated far more time to its first-party offering. Huffman has preceded over a greater push to mobile. Reddit still makes a slither of revenue from advertising in comparison to Facebook and Twitter, however it has started to see real progress, growing its ad business by 112 percent in the last two years. While it took a few years, Huffman (led by ex-CEO Ellen Pao’s anti-harassment policy) began to ban a lot of the less desirable subreddits and dish out harsher punishments to those harassing, doxing and insulting other people. At this point, Reddit had built a tight-knit community, but had several fundamental issues which scared advertisers and new users. It wouldn’t be until 2015, after a succession of CEOs brought in by Advance Publications, that the original duo of Huffman and Ohanian would take back the reigns. While many in the Reddit community liked the rather web 2.0 look, it began to lag behind the other social networks rapidly gaining traction, such as Facebook and Twitter. Huffman and Ohanian, alongside other early Reddit employees Aaron Swartz and Christopher Slowe, left Reddit in the next few years.
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