Times are hard these days, there is no denying it at all. Just take a look at the world around you – wars, rumors of wars, economic instability, unemployment, the whole works. Having said that, here is another person who has lost her job – or rather, voluntarily, as Ellen Pao has resigned from her position as interim chief executive of Reddit. The reason behind this resignation is not because she felt that her job there is done and she has achieved all that she wanted to, but rather, due to a backlash from the website’s users after she decided to let go of a popular member of staff.
Ms. Pao was said to have left by mutual agreement, followed by an announcement from the news site and discussion forum. Reddit has a pretty strong readership number – in fact, they hit 164 million unique visitors in the previous month alone, and the sacking of Victoria Taylor did raise plenty of hue and cry among the grassroots, if you could call them that.
Ms. Taylor had the popular “ask me anything” feature under her portfolio, where Reddit users were welcomed to submit questions to celebrities and public figures, where among them was President Barack Obama. After Ms. Taylor was given the sack, several volunteer moderators disabled parts of the Reddit website, and that included the “ask me everything” segment, as a show of protest. Ms. Pao will be replaced by Steve Huffman, one of the company’s co-founders.