Reddit Inc said on Friday that interim chief executive officer Ellen Pao (鮑康如) resigned from the company, and co-founder Steve Huffman has returned as chief executive officer.
The freewheeling online discussion forum and news Web site, which said it had 164 million visitors last month, has been rocked by unrest recently. The firing of Victoria Taylor — who helped run the site’s popular “Ask Me Anything” feature — earlier this month upset some users, leading to volunteers shutting down parts of the site, and there have been protests over new policies intended to fight harassment.
A statement posted on Reddit by Reddit board member Sam Altman on Friday said that Pao, who became interim chief executive officer in November last year, resigned from Reddit by mutual agreement and would continue to advise the board for the remainder of this year.
Altman acknowledged that Reddit moderators should have better tools and communication from the company, but took some users to task for the nature of their comments about Pao.
He said Reddit accepts disagreements, but said the site must exercise compassion if it wants to be a great community and said some of the things Reddit users wrote about Pao were “sickening.”
“Disagreements are fine. Death threats are not, are not covered under free speech and will continue to get offending users banned,” Altman wrote.
In an e-mail, Pao said she resigned because Reddit’s board was asking for faster user growth than she could deliver while holding on to the site’s core values. She defended Reddit’s policy changes, saying that despite criticism, the new rules are making the community stronger.
“We’ve taken bold and often controversial stances, but always with the greater good of the community in mind,” she said. “We tackled the thorny issues of harassment on the site, banning harassing behavior without censoring ideas. Though we came under fire on many fronts, we did not waver, working 24/7 to try to keep the site harassment-free.”
In a statement posted to Reddit, Pao thanks users who were supportive, saying the positives from the site far outweighed the negatives, and she urged Redditors to “remember the human” behind the keyboard.
Before becoming chief executive officer of Reddit, Pao had worked for a storied Silicon Valley venture capital firm, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. She lost a high-profile gender discrimination lawsuit against Kleiner Perkins in March that brought up issues of the gender imbalance and difficulties faced by women working in Silicon Valley.
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