July 11--Ellen Pao resigned as Reddit's interim chief executive on Friday, one week after the firing of a popular employee led many of the forum site's moderators to stage a revolt.
Pao announced her decision to step down in a post published to Reddit at 2:20 p.m. PT. She blamed her departure on a disagreement with the site's board, not the mounting criticism she'd faced from users and moderators recently.
"So why am I leaving? 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 wrote.
Steve Huffman, a Reddit co-founder and its original CEO, will regain the top spot at the company, board member Sam Altman said in a statement. He added that Pao would remain an advisor to the board through the end of the year.
"We are thankful for Ellen's many contributions to Reddit and the technology industry generally," he said. "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."
Pao, who recently lost a high-profile gender discrimination suit against a prominent Silicon Valley venture capital firm, has been repeatedly criticized by users who accused her of bringing an era of censorship to Reddit.
Reddit rarely policed its users for vitriolic or obscene behavior before Pao came aboard. But in recent months, she banned the posting of "revenge porn" and shut down forums dedicated to insulting certain races or sexual orientations.
That criticism reached a tipping point last week after Victoria Taylor, the site's talent director and an administrator who oversaw the immensely popular Ask Me Anything subreddit, was fired.
Furious that they were not notified of the decision ahead of time, moderators staged an open revolt on the site, blocking the public from accessing many of the site's most popular subreddits. That paralyzed some of Reddit's most popular content for more than a day.
At least 1,400 subreddits, including Ask Me Anything, were made private during the short protest.
It remains unclear why Taylor was fired. Wilson would not say if last week's incident had anything to do with Pao's decision to step down.
Pao has long been a controversial figure in Silicon Valley.
Her high-profile gender discrimination lawsuit against Kleiner Perkins Caufield Byers resulted in a March victory for the powerful VC firm after a civil jury found that Pao's former employer did not discriminate against her because of her gender and did not retaliate when she protested her treatment.
The five-week trial in San Francisco captivated the tech world and highlighted many of the gender bias issues facing women in the heavily male industry. But Pao emerged as an unlikable figure, one who was seen as petty, bitter and not a team player.
Mike Vorhaus, president of the strategy consulting firm Magid Advisors, said Reddit may have just been tired of the controversy.
"I think when this went from a one day story to a three day story, they decided they had to end the story," Vorhaus said. "You give Ms. Pao what I'm sure is a very good settlement and you say goodbye."
Vorhaus said Pao's baggage from the Kleiner Perkins lawsuit didn't help. Without it, she may have been given a second chance, but instead, the case plunged her into the spotlight.
"It's really hard to run a community like Reddit," Vorhaus said. "It's like being the mayor of a town of 1,000 people where every one comes to the town hall meetings. You're under more of a microscope when you're the CEO of a community-based site than an advertising tech company."
Altman, the board member, echoed those sentiments in his statement, saying it was "sickening to see some of the things Redditors wrote about Ellen."
"The reduction in compassion that happens when we're all behind computer screens is not good for the world," he said. "People are still people even if there is Internet between you."
Updates:
3:22 pm.: This story was updated with background on Ellen Pao's gender discrimination lawsuit and comments from Mike Vorhaus.
3:57 p.m.: This story was updated to include comments from Bernice Ledbetter, from Pepperdine University's Graziadio School of Business and Management.
