Reddit interim CEO Ellen Pao resigned today after facing an all-out revolt on the site in the wake of the firing of a popular employee. Steve Huffman, Reddit's original CEO and co-founder of the site a decade ago, is taking over the job as permanent CEO (according to Huffman), effective immediately.
"After more than two years at Reddit, I have resigned today," Pao wrote in a post on the site. "In my eight months as Reddit’s CEO, I’ve 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."
Explaining her specific reasons for stepping down, Pao said, "Ultimately, the board asked me to demonstrate higher user growth in the next six months than I believe I can deliver while maintaining Reddit’s core principles."
Pao’s resignation comes after a tumultuous week in the Reddit community, with users loudly protesting the company’s abrupt firing of Victoria Taylor, the site’s director of talent, over the Fourth of July weekend. Volunteer moderators protested the firing by taking several of the site's most popular subreddits private, effectively rendering much of Reddit dark.
Reddit board member and Y Combinator president Sam Altman said on the site that Pao resigned by mutual agreement. He said Pao would remain an advisor to Reddit's board through the end of the year.
"She brought a face to Reddit that changed perceptions, and is a pioneer for women in the tech industry," Altman said.
Pao gained national attention earlier this year as the plaintiff in a high-profile gender discrimination lawsuit against Kleiner Perkins, one of Silicon Valley's most prominent venture capital firms. The ensuing trial, which Pao lost, sparked a broad conversation about the lack of gender parity in the tech industry. Pao continued to serve as interim CEO at Reddit while the trial was under way.
On Monday, Pao took to Reddit to apologize for how Taylor's firing was handled, as well as years of mismanagement and poor communication between the company and the band of unpaid volunteer moderators who keep the site going.
Taylor, who ran the popular Ask Me Anything Q&A feature, was a main liaison between Reddit and its moderators, who manage the community’s 10,000 discussion boards and enforce its rules.
In a New York Times op-ed on Wednesday, AMA moderators Brian Lynch and Courtnie Swearingen wrote that they took down the site temporarily because Reddit's management had made critical changes without seeming to consider the impact on the site's volunteer community.
"The issue goes beyond Reddit," they wrote. "We are concerned with what a move like this means for for-profit companies that depend on the free labor of volunteers—and whether they truly understand what makes an online community vibrant."
Though Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian took responsibility for firing Taylor, Pao took much of the heat. As of Tuesday, a public petition on social justice platform Change.org demanding Pao’s resignation had garnered close to 200,000 signatures.
The unrest in the online community and Pao’s eventual resignation underscores the huge challenge Reddit faces in trying to turn a community-driven site into a profitable company. There have been signs that Reddit, which boasts an impressive 164 million monthly active users, has been trying to grow up for a while. The company recently announced it would launch an original video project and has alluded to an expansion of its nascent advertising business. Though Reddit is valued internally at $250 million, according to its lawyers, the site reported just $8.3 million in ad revenue for 2014—not exactly an impressive number for the tenth most-trafficked website in the US and the so-called "front page of the Internet."
But to improve on its business goals, Reddit the company can't afford to alienate Reddit the community. Company management seems to have realized it needs to act more visibly to close the rift between the business and the unpaid community members who keep it afloat.
In an interview with WIRED, Altman acknowledged that Pao’s resignation did seem imminent, especially given the events of the past week. “But my take is very positive. I think Ellen did a great job in a very messy situation,” he says.
Altman denied that Pao was fired. He said that, although there was "plenty of fair critique" of Pao for decisions the Reddit community didn’t like, there was also a lot of "sickening" hate and name-calling.
Among the more contentious controversies during Pao's tenure was the site's effort to update its anti-harassment policies, which recently led to the banning of multiple subreddits, including white supremacist and fat-shaming forums. "You can’t legislate the hate away. That doesn’t work. But you can try to build software in a way to emphasize the good parts," Altman said.
He called Huffman, Reddit’s new CEO, a “focused and thoughtful” person capable of aiding Reddit in that effort. "I think there are not that many people in the world who are great at engineering product and also creating community, and Steve is rare in the first part there," Altman says. "And the fact that he’s the founder of that is a huge benefit."
All in all, Altman said he has bright hopes for Reddit’s future. "The cool thing about Reddit is that people are so passionate about it," he says. "People really love it, and I would like it to move towards more people loving it. More of the good, and less of the hate."
