• Social media platform Reddit is set to join its contemporaries as it announces restructuring efforts.
• It will reduce its workforce by 5 percent, or 90 employees.
• The company has been trying to tighten up its spending and earnings as the industry prepares for tough economic conditions in the global market.

Layoffs across the tech industry continue, with nearly 2 000 different companies in the industry announcing some form of job cuts since 2022. Restructuring efforts have been undertaken in manufacturing firms and social media houses, among others, in response to an expected global economic downturn caused by the Russian invasion of Ukraine and lingering effects of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The latest to announce staff cuts is social media and content aggregator Reddit, which will see its workforce reduced by five percent, around 90 individuals, according to an email seen by the Wall Street Journal (paywall).

Worldwide Reddit employs around 2 000 people, and will reduce its hiring plans going forward, hiring about 200 people less than previous expectations.

Overall, the company – whose population of active users rivals that of South Africa at 57 million – seems to have weathered the storm quite well in comparison to the jobs bloodbath experienced by the likes of Meta and Twitter.

Mark Zuckerberg’s social media giant which counts Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram in its stable announced two rounds of layoffs with 21 000 positions axed since November 2022, around 24 percent of staff.

For Meta, a more efficient and streamlined corporate atmosphere was given as the reason for the cuts. Meanwhile, Elon Musk’s Twitter cut jobs to reduce its costs and bloated offices, ridding itself of 10 percent of its staff.

Reddit is in a similar boat, restructuring staffers in order to keep its earnings strong. According to an email sent to employees by CEO Steve Huffman, Reddit “had a solid first half of the year, and this restructuring will position us to carry that momentum into the second half and beyond.”

In April, Reddit began charging companies that scrape its data troves for information for use of the platform’s API. At the time, Huffman said these efforts were to “tighten things up.”

“The Reddit corpus of data is really valuable. More than any other place on the internet, Reddit is a home for authentic conversation. There’s a lot of stuff on the site that you’d only ever say in therapy, or AA, or never at all … But we don’t need to give all of that value to some of the largest companies in the world for free,” Huffman told the New York Times.

[Image – Photo by Brett Jordan on Unsplash]