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 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, and r/science 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 Kleiner Perkins and Reddit's June 2015 banning of harassing subreddits. A Change.org petition demanding her resignation gathered roughly 200,000+ signatures, accompanied by overtly sexist and racist attacks; she was mockingly nicknamed 'Chairman Pao.' 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' — 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.
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 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 later large-scale moderator revolts.