A Silicon Valley attorney, Ellen Pao the CEO of Reddit, has been dubbed “Chairman Pao” by users, after she fired a popular director and vowing to make Reddit a “safe space” for “marginalized voices”.
It may come as little shock to anyone reading this blog that Ellen Pao, before joining Reddit sued her last employer for gender discrimination after they fired her.
Via CNN:
On Friday, the social news site Reddit was on lockdown.
More than 100 subreddits on gaming, movies, science, etc. went dark for a few hours for the “Reddit Revolt,” a reaction to the news that Reddit’s communications director, Victoria Taylor, was let go on Thursday.
One of Taylor’s roles was coordinating the site’s wildly popular Ask Me Anything (AMA) series, where celebrities, political leaders, pop culture icons or simply people with interesting stories would answer questions from the Reddit community.
“IAmA,” a subforum within the AMA series that hosted President Obama in 2012 and astronaut Chris Hadfield, who was orbiting space during his online chat, was one of the first places on the site to shutdown in protest.
Taylor’s dismissal came as a shock to AMA moderators, who are volunteer users that help manage individual communities within Reddit. One moderator of IAmA shared that the news of Taylor leaving was like “a rug ripped out from underneath us.”