Steve Huffman Biography
Steve Huffman is an American web developer and tech entrepreneur. He is also known by his Reddit username spez. Steve is the co-founder and CEO of Reddit, a social news and discussion website, that ranks in the top 10 websites in the world.
Huffman attended Wakefield School in The Plains, Virginia where she graduated in 2001. He studied computer science at the University of Virginia, graduating in 2005.
Steve Huffman Age
Steve Huffman was born on November 12, 1983 ( 34 years old as of 2018). He grew up in Warrenton, Virginia. He began programming computers at the age of 8.
Steve Huffman Family
His family information is not yet disclosed.
Steve Huffman Married
Steve Huffman is married to Katie Babiarz.
Steve Huffman Reddit
During spring break of his senior year at UVA, Huffman and his college roommate Alexis Ohanian drove to Boston, Massachusetts, to attend a lecture delivered by programmer-entrepreneur Paul Graham. Huffman and Alexis talked with Graham after the lecture and Graham invited them to apply to his startup incubator Y Combinator.
Steve came up with their original idea, My Mobile Menu. It was intended to allow users to order food by SMS. Their idea was rejected, but Paul asked Huffman and Ohanian to meet him in Boston to pitch another idea for a start-up. It was at that brainstorming session that the idea for what Graham called the “front page of the Internet” was created. Steve and Alexis were accepted in Y Combinator’s first class. Steve coded the entire site in Lisp. In June 2005, he and Ohanian launched Reddit funded by Y Combinator.
The site’s audience grew rapidly in its first few months, and by August 2005, Steve noticed their habitual user-base had grown so large. He no longer needed to fill the front page with content himself. At 23, Steve and Ohanian sold Reddit to Condé Nast on October 31, 2006, for a reported $10 million to $20 million. Steve remained with Reddit until 2009, when he left his role as acting CEO.
In 2014, he said that his decision to sell Reddit had been a mistake, and that the site’s growth had exceeded his expectations. Reddit hired Huffman on July 10, 2015 as CEO following the resignation of Ellen Pao and during a particularly difficult time for the company. Upon rejoining the company, Steve’s top goals included launching Reddit’s iOS and Android apps, fixing Reddit’s mobile website, and also creating A/B testing infrastructure.
Since returning to Reddit, Steve instituted a number of technological improvements including a better mobile experience and stronger infrastructure, as well as new content guidelines. It included a ban on content that incites violence, quarantining some material users might find offensive, and then removing communities “that exist solely to […] make Reddit worse for everyone else”. Shortly after returning, he wrote that “neither Alexis nor I created reddit to be a bastion of free speech, but rather as a place where open and honest discussion can happen.” In a 2012 interview, Alexis had used the same phrase to describe Reddit, as noted by The New Yorker and The Verge.
Steve also worked to make the site more advertiser-friendly and it led efforts to host video and images on site. He was the focus of controversy for altering posts on a subreddit popular with supporters of Donald Trump in late 2016, /r/The_Donald. Following criticism from Reddit users, Huffman undid the change and issued an apology. He led the redesign of Reddit’s website with its first major visual update in a decade beginning in 2017. Steve said the site had looked like a “dystopian Craigslist” whose outdated look deterred new users. The development of the new site took more than a year, and the redesign was launched in April 2018.
Steve Huffman Hipmunk
Steve spent several months backpacking in Costa Rica before co-creating the travel website Hipmunk with Adam Goldstein, an author and software developer, in 2010. Funded by Y Combinator, Hipmunk launched in August 2010 with Steve serving as CTO. In 2011, Inc. named Huffman to its 30 under 30 list.
Steve Huffman Net Worth
The American tech entrepreneur has an estimated net worth of $4 million.
Steve Huffman Salary
Huffman’s salary is not yet disclosed.
Steve Huffman Udacity
In Udacity, Huffman offers a Web development course. In the intermediate course, Huffman will teach you everything he wished he knew when he began building Reddit and, more recently, Hipmunk, as a lead engineer. From the basics of how the web works, the course walks you through core web development concepts such as how internet and browsers fit together, form validations, databases, APIs, integrating with other websites, scaling issues, and more. Generally, all of which form part of the knowledge it takes to build a web application of your own.
Steve Huffman Net Neutrality Activism
Steve is an advocate for net neutrality rules. In 2017, he told The New York Times that without net neutrality protections, “you give internet service providers the ability to choose winners and losers”. On Reddit, he urged redditors to express support for net neutrality and contact their elected representatives in Washington, D.C. Steve said that the repeal of net neutrality rules stifles competition. He said he and Reddit would continue to advocate for net neutrality.
Steve Huffman Talks Of The Importance Of Net Neutrality
Steve Huffman Trump
Published; Oct 2, 2018
Source; https://www.fastcompany.com
Donald Trump’s internet virality engine lurks deep in a section of Reddit known as The_Donald. It has more than 600,000 subscribers and was–along with Facebook, Twitter, and other sites–one of the spawning grounds for the Russian disinformation campaign in the lead-up to the 2016 election. Reddit noted much later, as other social media platforms were answering tough questions from Congress on foreign influence online in April 2018, that it had identified 944 user accounts it believed were associated with the Russian Internet Research Agency, noting that it had banned them all, the majority prior to the election.
Last week, new accusations of attempted foreign influence surfaced. A user posted an explainer that claimed he’d tracked a successor to the IRA’s earlier activities on the site. Reddit banned four of the main suspect domains–but was widely criticized for not having previously caught them. A Reddit spokesperson said the investigation into suspicious content is ongoing: “We have dedicated teams that enforce our site-wide policies, proactively go after bad actors on the site, and create engineering solutions to prevent them in the future.” Reddit would not confirm that the four domains it had banned were connected to Russian disinformation campaigns, only that they had broken site rules.
This was nothing new for Reddit, a site that has since its earliest days attracted the brightest and most toxic elements of the internet. CEO Steve Huffman, who hand-coded the site when he launched it with Alexis Ohanian in 2005 and who returned in 2015 to the company to try to save it in the wake of a scandal that threatened to topple it, has overseen the purges of many other types of noxious content on Reddit. Since 2015, the company has banned violence against animals, threats against individuals, gun sales, and sections of the site (“subreddits”) dedicated to the alt-right.
While r/The_Donald has been subject to much scrutiny, it has escaped such drastic punishment. Since its inception, Redditors opposed to Trump or activities of his online supporters, or opposed to its casual misogyny and uncivil discourse, have called for Reddit to ban it. In plenty of cases, they’ve had a point: Users and moderators of r/The_Donald have broken many, if not all, of the site’s rules.
I’ve been interviewing Huffman for my book since 2011. I’ve not only witnessed the evolution of his thinking in creating a “free speech” site, but have had a close-up view into the site’s working as its policies have changed. He’s told me he dislikes much about The_Donald, including its political views and tone. But he still argues that Trump supporters deserve an online home. “Now, I don’t always factor in ‘what’s good for the United States’ into my decisions,” Huffman told me. “But Reddit’s getting to a point where our actions do have an impact.” (It’s the fifth most popular destination on the American internet. One-third of all Americans view at least something on the site every month, by Reddit’s estimates.)