Mark Luckie, one of the tech world’s most vocal advocates for diversity has joined the Reddit community.
The former manager of News and Journalism at Twitter, Luckie will serve as the Head of Journalism and Media for the online community known to many as the “front page of the internet.”
Luckie made the official announcement Tuesday and will start his new gig on February 22.
“I’m pulling from my experience in and vast knowledge of the journalism industry,” he told NBCBLK prior to the announcement. “I'll be managing partner relationships with media organizations, developing integrations and working with internal teams to roll out tools that reflect the needs of publications and governmental organizations.”
Luckie said the work he will be doing for Reddit will be similar to his role at Twitter, but on a broader scale.
“This role also has a particular focus on politics and governmental organizations and did not exist previously,” he said. “In my previous role, I focused almost exclusively on partnerships with news organizations. Now, I'll also be facilitating conversations with political candidates, government officials and more.”
Since leaving Twitter in May of 2015, Luckie has become one of the most visible critics on the lack of diversity in leadership and decision-making positions in the tech industry. When Twitter announced the hiring of Jeffrey Siminoff as their Vice President of Diversity and Inclusion, Luckie was one of the first to lend his voice of disappointment in the hiring.
“I think across the board, tech companies know that they can’t shirk their users, especially when those users come from diverse groups,” Luckie said. “Users are not going to let [tech companies] overlook diversity anymore.”
In many ways, it seems, Reddit is taking a cue from its users.
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Luckie, who professes to be fascinated by the “something for everyone vibe” of Reddit describes the social network as an online community where everything from geophysics, to calico cats to politics in Montana can be discussed in what is called "subreddits."
“The site has more than 230 million visitors a month and is made up of almost 900,000 subreddits. Its strength is these smaller communities housed within a global framework,” he said. “So much of the content you see on the internet - stories, trends, memes - originate on the platform and make their way through the rest of the web.”
Luckie considers the hiring of diversity heads at Pinterest and Twitter in the past six months a signal of tech’s growing public commitment to diversity.
“For me, being one the more vocal proponents at the beginning of this change, I think a lot of credit goes to Reddit for bringing me in knowing I have been so vocal,” he said. “I think this does present a change across the industry, and I hope to see a lot more of it.”
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