Reddit CEO Ellen Pao resigns; replaced by co-founder Steve Huffman

When **Reddit sacked Victoria Taylor** , Director of Talent, little would anyone have expected that CEO Ellen Pao would have to pay the eventual price. According to a report in the New York Times, “The attacks were worse on Ellen because she is a woman,” said Sam Altman, a member of the Reddit board. “And that’s just a shame against humanity.” More than 213,000 people signed a petition demanding Ms. Pao’s resignation. After her departure was announced, Reddit users celebrated in an over-the-top fashion. “Rejoice internet brethren,” wrote one. “The great evil has been slain.” In the Guardian, “Pao urged those users who attacked her to remember that she was “just another human; I have a family, and I have feelings”. In a resignation statement, she wrote that she has seen “the good, the bad and the ugly on Reddit. The good has been off-the-wall inspiring, and the ugly made me doubt humanity”. Reddit announced in a post: Ellen Pao resigned from reddit today by mutual agreement. I’m delighted to announce that Steve Huffman, founder and the original reddit CEO, is returning as CEO. We are thankful for Ellen’s many contributions to reddit and the technology industry generally. She brought focus to chaos, recruited a world-class team of executives, and drove growth. She brought a face to reddit that changed perceptions, and is a pioneer for women in the tech industry. She will remain as an advisor to the board through the end of 2015. I look forward to seeing the great things she does beyond that. We’re very happy to have Steve back. Product and community are the two legs of reddit, and the board was very focused on finding a candidate who excels at both (truthfully, community is harder), which Steve does. He has the added bonus of being a founder with ten years of reddit history in his head. Steve is rejoining Alexis, who will work alongside Steve with the new title of “cofounder”. A few other points. Mods, you are what makes reddit great. The reddit team, now with Steve, wants to do more for you. You deserve better moderation tools and better communication from the admins. Second, redditors, you deserve clarity about what the content policy of reddit is going to be. The team will create guidelines to both preserve the integrity of reddit and to maintain reddit as the place where the most open and honest conversations with the entire world can happen. Third, as a redditor, I’m particularly happy that Steve is so passionate about mobile. I’m very excited to use reddit more on my phone. As a closing note, it was sickening to see some of the things redditors wrote about Ellen. [1] The reduction in compassion that happens when we’re all behind computer screens is not good for the world. People are still people even if there is Internet between you. If the reddit community cannot learn to balance authenticity and compassion, it may be a great website but it will never be a truly great community. Steve’s great challenge as CEO [2] will be continuing the work Ellen started to drive this forward. [1] Disagreements are fine. Death threats are not, are not covered under free speech, and will continue to get offending users banned. Ellen asked me to point out that the sweeping majority of redditors didn’t do this, and many were incredibly supportive. Although the incredible power of the Internet is the amplification of voices, unfortunately sometimes those voices are hateful. [2] We were planning to run a CEO search here and talked about how Steve (who we assumed was unavailable) was the benchmark candidate—he has exactly the combination of talent and vision we were looking for. To our delight, it turned out our hypothetical benchmark candidate is the one actually taking the job. NOTE: I am going to let the reddit team answer questions here, and go do an AMA myself now. Pao wrote, “Everyone attacked on Reddit is just another person like you and me. When people make something up to attack me or someone else, it spreads, and we eventually will see it. And we will feel bad, not just about what was said.” Recently, popular online bulletin board system and social networking site Reddit, known for its ‘Ask Me Anything’ celebrity interaction sessions was **temporarily ‘offline’** . Director of Communication at Reddit, Victoria Taylor was let go from her position. This angered a vast majority of moderators at Reddit, who decided to take the popular sub-reddits or conversation threads on the popular site to private mode, effectively rendering them offline to its users. After the **widespread protests** by Reddit users and moderators, Reddit Chief Executive Ellen Pao on Monday issued an apology to users of the popular social news platform over the way the company handled the dismissal of a well-liked employee last week, a move that drew widespread outrage from users.