Alexis Ohanian Resigns From Reddit's Board and Asks to Be Replaced by a Black Director (2020)

On June 5, 2020, in the midst of the global protests that followed the murder of George Floyd, Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian announced that he was resigning from the company's board of directors and asked that his seat be filled by a Black candidate. 'I believe resignation can actually be an act of leadership from people in power right now,' he wrote, adding a message to protesters: 'To everyone fighting to fix our broken nation: do not stop.'

Reddit acted on the request within days. On June 10, 2020, the company named Michael Seibel — the chief executive of the startup accelerator Y Combinator, which had helped launch Reddit in 2005, and a co-founder of Justin.tv, the service that became Twitch — to its board, making him the first Black director in Reddit's history. Ohanian also pledged $1 million to Colin Kaepernick's Know Your Rights Camp and said he would direct future gains on his Reddit stock toward serving the Black community and curbing racial hate.

The resignation did not occur in a vacuum. It came as Reddit faced pointed criticism — including from its own former chief executive, Ellen Pao — over years of tolerating racist and hateful communities and over the lack of diversity among its leadership and volunteer moderators. Days after Ohanian stepped down, Reddit carried out its largest-ever content purge, the June 2020 'Great Ban' that removed roughly 2,000 subreddits including r/The_Donald, and CEO Steve Huffman publicly acknowledged that the company's long-standing free-speech posture had shielded hateful content.

Ohanian's exit was widely praised as a rare act of corporate self-sacrifice, but it also underscored the structural point that a single co-founder could hand-pick the terms of his own replacement — a reminder of how concentrated Reddit's governance remained. It marked a pivot in how the company talked about race and moderation, and it is the corporate bookend to the same 2020 reckoning that reshaped Reddit's content policy.