Month: December 2025

• Reddit is retiring r/popular as its default feed.
• CEO Steve Huffman said the feed “gives the false impression of a singular Reddit culture.”
• He said removing the feature would promote a more personalized and relevant user experience.

Reddit is getting rid of one of its oldest fixtures.

The platform’s CEO, Steve Huffman, said in a post that Reddit would be removing its r/popular feed from the homepage for new users to promote a more personalized and relevant user experience.

The popular feed, located on the left sidebar of the website, displays the most liked recent posts across the platform.

“In theory, it’s what’s most popular on Reddit, but it’s actually what is liked by the most active users on Reddit—which is not the same thing,” he said. “Having it as a default feed gives the false impression of a singular Reddit culture, one that is neither representative of Reddit nor appealing to new users (or anyone at all, IMO).”

He summed up his disdain for the feature by saying, “r/popular sucks, and we’re moving away from it, and towards better, more relevant and personalized feeds.”

Huffman, who has been the platform’s CEO since 2015, said Reddit would stop showing the popular feed in the sidebar unless users read it regularly.

He said his favorite part of Reddit was that every community on the platform had its own unique culture, rules, and sense of humor.

“And if your perspective isn’t represented, you can create the community you want to see,” he said. “The freedom to build your own corner of the internet is what makes Reddit, Reddit.”

The platform gets 116 million visitors daily, he said. Reddit’s stock price has risen about 44% in the past year.

In the post, he announced a few other changes, like limiting the number of high-traffic communities a single person can moderate, and changing the way it shows community sizes.

“These changes are all part of the same goal: making Reddit more conducive to how people actually use it today,” he said.

This is not Reddit’s first effort to nudge its users into smaller community groups, as it recalibrates its platform alongside competitors like Quora, and beyond that, the likes of Meta.

In October, Reddit removed its public chat feature and urged users to chat on private group chats as a way to “connect with communities in smaller, focused spaces.”

• LinkedIn is dismantling its associate product manager program.
• It’s replacing it with an associate builder track that trains hires to code, design, and product manage.
• LinkedIn’s chief product officer said the company has adopted small “pods” of full-stack builders.

LinkedIn is dismantling one of Silicon Valley’s most familiar early-career tracks: the associate product manager program.

It will be replaced with a new program that trains people to code, design, and build products end-to-end.

LinkedIn’s chief product officer, Tomer Cohen, said on an episode of “Lenny’s Podcast” published Thursday that the company’s long-running associate product manager program will end this year.

Starting in January, new hires will enter the associate product builder program, he said.

“We’re going to teach them how to code, design, and PM at LinkedIn,” he added, referring to product management.

The shift is part of a broader internal transformation built around what LinkedIn calls the full-stack builder model. Instead of splitting responsibilities among product managers, designers, and engineers, the company wants employees who can bring a product from idea to launch themselves, “regardless of their role in the stack,” Cohen said. These builders can combine skills that were once separated across different job functions.

Cohen said he wants these builders to develop vision, empathy, communication, creativity, and judgment — especially the ability to make “high-quality decisions in what is complex, ambiguous situations.”

“Everything else, I’m working really hard to automate,” he added.

The model is also reshaping how teams are structured. Instead of large groups split by function, LinkedIn has adopted small “pods” of cross-trained builders, allowing it to be more nimble, adaptive, and resilient.

“They can actually match the pace of change to the pace of response,” Cohen said.

It’s “less about an engineer, designer, PM working together” and more about people “who can flex across,” he added.

Cohen, who has worked at LinkedIn for nearly 14 years, said in a post on the platform last month that he is leaving the company in January.

The end of product managers?

Business Insider’s Amanda Hoover reported last year that product managers are increasingly seen as critical in the tech world, but some remain skeptical about the role’s value.

Some companies have reevaluated their need for product managers. Business Insider’s Ashley Stewart reported in March that Microsoft wants to shift its workforce composition by increasing the number of engineers relative to product or program managers to run leaner. Other companies, like Airbnb and Snap, have been rethinking the need for product managers.

Surge AI CEO Edwin Chen said on an episode of the “No Priors” podcast published in July that early-stage teams don’t need product managers at all.

Engineering leaders should drive product direction until they no longer have the bandwidth. “Your engineer should be hands-on. They should be having great ideas as well,” he said.

Others take the opposite view. Google Brain founder Andrew Ng said in an episode of the “No Priors” podcast published in August that product management, not engineering speed, has become the bottleneck in AI startups.

In the past, building a prototype might have taken three weeks, so waiting another week for user feedback was acceptable. But when AI tools let teams build a prototype in a day, having to “wait a week for user feedback” is “really painful,” Ng said.

That pressure forces startups to make faster product decisions, the kind of calls product managers are trained to make, he added.

• Fei-Fei Li criticized extreme AI rhetoric as misleading and unhelpful for public discourse.
• She urged balanced, factual communication about artificial intelligence and its impact.
• Other AI leaders, including Andrew Ng and Yann LeCun, have also called for balanced AI messaging.

The current rhetoric around AI is far too dramatic, says the Godmother of AI.

“I like to say I’m the most boring speaker in AI these days because precisely my disappointment is the hyperbole on both sides,” Fei-Fei Li said in a talk at Stanford University published on Thursday.

“We’ve got the total extinction, doomsday, and all that talk about AI will ruin humanity, machine overlord,” she said. On the other hand, she said, there is the “total utopian” scenario where people use words like “post-scarcity” and “infinite productivity.”

Li is a longtime Stanford computer science professor famous for inventing ImageNet. Last year, she cofounded World Labs, a company building AI models to perceive, generate, and interact with 3D environments.

At the Stanford talk, she added that this “extreme rhetoric” is filling tech discourse and misinforming vulnerable people.

“The world’s population, especially those who are not in Silicon Valley, need to hear the facts, need to hear what this truly is,” she said. “Yet that kind of discourse, that kind of communication, that kind of public education is not as good as I hope it is.”

Li is among the top computer scientists who are advocating for more balanced messaging around AI and its impact on society.

In July, Google Brain founder Andrew Ng said that he thinks artificial general intelligence is overrated.

AGI refers to a stage when AI systems possess human-level cognitive abilities and can learn and apply knowledge just like people. The execs of leading AI labs are often asked when they think AGI is coming and what it will mean for human workers.

“AGI has been overhyped,” Ng said in a talk at Y Combinator. “For a long time, there’ll be a lot of things that humans can do that AI cannot.”

Meta’s former chief AI scientist, Yann LeCun, has said that large language models are “astonishing” but limited.

“They’re not a road towards what people call AGI,” he said in an interview last year. “I hate the term. They’re useful, there’s no question. But they are not a path towards human-level intelligence.”

Last Month, LeCun announced on LinkedIn that he was leaving Meta after 12 years to launch an AI startup.