Reddit interim CEO Ellen Pao steps down
Ellen Pao, the interim chief executive of Reddit, resigned Friday afternoon from the online forum that describes itself as the “front page of the Internet.”
Steve Huffman, who was the original Reddit CEO, will take over the position, according to Sam Altman, a Reddit board member and president of Y Combinator. Altman described the decision as mutual.
In multiple interviews with news outlets before the resignation was publicly announced, Pao said the Reddit board had “a more aggressive view than I did.”
{mosads}“It became clear that the board and I had a different view on the ability of Reddit to grow this year,” She told The New York Times. “Because of that, it made sense to bring someone in that shared the same view.”
Last November, Pao took over as interim CEO of the company, which was founded in 2005. She became the topic of numerous headlines earlier this year during a trial over the gender discrimination lawsuit filed against her former employer, venture capital firm Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield and Byers.
The Friday afternoon news comes less than a week after Pao apologized to the website’s community for the ouster of a highly visible Reddit employee, Victoria Taylor, without warning.
News of Taylor’s departure earlier this month spawned hundreds of thousands to sign a petition calling for Pao to step down. It also caused many moderators to shut down some of the site’s threads out of protest.
“We screwed up,” Pao said in a note earlier this week. “Not just on July 2, but also over the past several years. We haven’t communicated well, and we have surprised moderators and the community with big changes.”
She added at the time: “We have apologized and made promises to you, the moderators and the community, over many years, but time and again, we haven’t delivered on them. When you’ve had feedback or requests, we haven’t always been responsive. The mods and the community have lost trust in me and in us, the administrators of reddit.”
In a note announcing Pao’s departure, Altman said the site would clarify its content policy and create new guidelines in reaction to criticism from the community and volunteer moderators.
But he also took the opportunity to chastise some on the site for the vitriol that had been aimed at Pao.
“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,” he said.
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