Ellen Pao, the embattled interim CEO of Reddit, resigned on Friday after a week of intense and sometimes vicious criticism over the dismissal of a popular employee. Steve Huffman, the Reddit’s original CEO and co-founder of the site a decade ago, is taking over the job, effective immediately. “She brought focus to chaos, recruited a world-class team of executives, and drove growth”, Altman said in a statement to Recode.
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“It became clear that the board and I had a different view on the ability of Reddit to grow this year”, Ms. Pao said in an interview.
“The buck stops with me”, she added.
The statement said the departure was by mutual agreement.
After spending the last few months turning Reddit into a virtual guillotine for its widely-despised CEO Ellen Pao, it looks like redditors are finally getting their wish.
Pao banned hate speech at Reddit and instituted a hiring policy that prohibited negotiations to ensure men and women earned equal salaries, among other changes.
After one massive bit of controversy due to the firing of Reddit’s director of talent Victoria Taylor, the site’s CEO has been announced as leaving the company.
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“The reduction in compassion that happens when we’re all behind computer screens is not good for the world”, wrote Sam Altman, a lead investor in the site. We haven’t communicated well, and we have surprised moderators and the community with big changes…. Everyone attacked on reddit is just another person like you and me. Many blamed Pao, and in protest, moderators suspended about dozens of the site’s top subreddits, or topic-specific forums. Huffman, chief technology officer at the travel startup Hipmunk Inc., has had no official role for several years at Reddit.
