Ellen Pao's Resignation as Reddit Interim CEO and the 'Chairman Pao' Harassment Campaign
July 2015
Reddit interim CEO Ellen Pao resigned on July 10, 2015, after the surprise firing of popular talent director Victoria Taylor triggered a site-wide moderator revolt, and a petition demanding her ouster drew more than 200,000 signatures amid a torrent of sexist and racist abuse directed at her.
What happened
On July 2, 2015, Reddit abruptly dismissed Victoria Taylor, the director of talent who coordinated the popular AMA (Ask Me Anything) series and served as a key liaison between volunteer moderators and management. Because moderators relied on her to run high-profile AMAs, her removal without warning prompted a rapid revolt: moderators set major default subreddits such as r/IAmA, r/movies, r/science, r/gaming, and r/Art to private in early July 2015, crystallizing years of grievances over inadequate tools and poor communication.
The backlash quickly concentrated on interim CEO Ellen Pao, already polarizing after her unsuccessful gender-discrimination suit against venture firm Kleiner Perkins and Reddit's June 2015 banning of harassing subreddits. A Change.org petition demanding her resignation gathered more than 200,000 signatures, accompanied by overtly sexist and racist attacks; she was mockingly nicknamed 'Chairman Pao' in a play on Mao Zedong. On July 6 she and the company posted an apology — 'We screwed up. Not just on July 2, but also over the past several years' — and pledged better moderator tools, but it did not quell the uproar.
On July 10, 2015, Pao resigned. The board framed it as a 'mutual agreement,' but Pao said she and the board disagreed about direction, writing that the board had asked her to demonstrate higher user growth than she believed she could deliver while preserving Reddit's principles. Co-founder Steve Huffman returned as CEO.
Pao subsequently wrote publicly and in her 2017 memoir 'Reset' about the experience, arguing she had been made the public face of unpopular but necessary anti-harassment policies and then scapegoated, and noting the gendered nature of much of the abuse. The episode is now frequently taught as a case study in online mob dynamics, the precarious position of women in tech leadership, and the structural power that Reddit's unpaid moderators wield over the company.
Impact
Pao's exit became a defining episode in debates about online harassment, gender in tech, and the governance of community-driven platforms. Board chair and lead investor Sam Altman acknowledged the abuse, writing that 'it was sickening to see some of the things redditors wrote about Ellen.' The episode demonstrated the leverage Reddit's unpaid moderators hold — a coordinated blackout pressured the company into both an apology and a leadership change within roughly a week — and foreshadowed the far larger moderator revolts of 2021 and 2023.