Reddit CEO Slams Protesting Users as ‘Landed Gentry’

Reddit CEO Steve Huffman is digging in his heels and insulting the platform’s furious users, who are angry over the company’s decision to charge thousands of dollars for access to its application programming interface (API), which allows developers to access the data needed to create third-party applications. Speaking to NBC News on Thursday, Huffman argued that an ongoing boycott wasn’t “actually representative of their communities,” slamming its ringleaders as “landed gentry” and insisting that they were the problem. “If you’re a politician or a business owner, you are accountable to your constituents. So a politician needs to be elected, and a business owner can be fired by its shareholders,” he said. “And I think on Reddit, the analogy is closer to the landed gentry: The people who get their first get to stay there and pass it down to their descendants, and that is not democratic.” The 39-year-old executive also went to NPR, where he continued to downplay the uproar. “It’s a small group that’s very upset, and there’s no way around that. We made a business decision that upset them,” he said. “But I think the greater Reddit community just want to participate with their fellow community members.”