Loading…
Search issues, trackers, people, glossary, and more
Story arc · 2012–2015
A CEO hired to clean up the site takes the blame for its problems — and the community revolt that followed reshaped Reddit's leadership and policies.
Reddit's mid-2010s identity crisis has a name attached to it, and it is probably the wrong one. Ellen Pao served as interim CEO for less than a year, yet the era's defining conflicts — the first bans of hate communities, the firing that sparked a site-wide moderator blackout, and the harassment campaign that drove her out — are still known as the "Pao era."
This arc follows the sequence from the free-speech doctrine that preceded her, through the fatpeoplehate bans and AMAgeddon, to her resignation under a petition with nearly a quarter-million signatures — and the aftermath that proved the problems were never really about her.