New Delhi, Jun 17 (IANS): Inspired by Elon Musk's massive layoffs, Reddit CEO Steve Huffman has refused to budge against widespread protests over the application programming interface (API) changes on its platform, saying plans to pursue changes and "don't have problems with protests."

In an interview with NBC News, Huffman said that "my takeaway from Twitter and Elon at Twitter is reaffirming that we can build a really good business in this space at our scale."

"You can run a company with that many users in the ads business and break even with a lot fewer people. They had to do some pretty violent changes and violent surgery to get there," he added.

In protest to the API changes that are forcing some third-party developers to shut down their apps, thousands of Reddit communities have gone dark on the platform.

Reddit said that it is "not shutting down discussions or unilaterally reopening communities."

"We have not threatened anyone. That's not how we operate. Pressuring people is not our goal. We're communicating expectations and how things work. Redditors want to reddit and mods want to mod. We want mods who want to mod to be able to do so," a company spokesperson told The Verge.

According to Huffman, the social discussion platform was never designed to support third-party applications.

According to Huffman, those third-party apps aren't adding much value to the platform.

"So the vast majority of the uses of the API -- not (third-party apps like Apollo for Reddit) -- the other 98 per cent of them, make tools, bots, enhancements to Reddit. That's what the API is for," the Reddit CEO said in a statement.