SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – Ellen Pao is resigning as acting chief executive of social news platform Reddit, a source familiar with situation said on Friday.
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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.
Pao will be replaced by founder and original CEO Steve Huffman, reddit says.
“We are thankful for Ellen’s many contributions to reddit and the technology industry generally”, Altman wrote. “She brought focus to chaos, recruited a world-class team of executives, and drove growth”.
Pao will stay on as an advisor to Reddit’s board of directors until the end of the year.
“The buck stops with me”, she added.
Pao also called the decision mutual.
Ellen Pao has bowed to pressure to quit as chief executive of Reddit following a series of management missteps. Volunteer moderators protested the firing by taking several of the site’s most popular subreddits private, effectively rendering much of Reddit dark. Everyone attacked on reddit is just another person like you and me. And she told NPR in an interview: “We have apologized for not communicating better with the moderators”. The mods and the community have lost trust in me and in us, the administrators of reddit.
Regarding Huffman, the statement posted on Reddit said: “We’re very happy to have Steve back”.
The administration has rankled many of its users over the past few months as Pao worked to reign in the wild west ethos of the site that sometimes tended towards vitriol or hate speech.
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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.
