It's been a turbulent few months for the online community message board
The chief executive of the online community message board Reddit has resigned, the company announced Thursday after months of internal turbulence, and one of its co-founders will return full-time.
Outgoing CEO Yishan Wong came under fire after employees were asked to relocate to San Francisco or find work elsewhere, and after Wong publicly disputed the details of a former staffer’s termination process with that ex-worker on Reddit itself. An adviser to the company wrote that Wong’s departure came last week after a disagreement with the board over the location and cost of new office space.
Ellen Pao, the company’s strategic partnerships head, will step in as interim CEO during a search for a permanent replacement. But perhaps even more notable is the return of Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian, who left four years ago and will return as Executive Chairman.
Ohanian, who founded the site in 2005 alongside his former college roommate Steve Huffman, became a household name in the tech community in 2012 when he positioned himself as a leadership figure and spokesperson at the fore of a since-successful movement against a pair of congressional bills designed to curb online piracy. Many opponents deemed them too broad.
On Thursday, Ohanian told TIME he decided to return to Reddit full-time after getting pressure from the company’s board — of which he was a member — after Wong submitted his resignation.
“I had a bunch of my fellow board members asking me to get back involved,” Ohanian said. “And I had a long conversation with my girlfriend, I talked to my dad about it, and ultimately decided that this was the time to get re-engaged full-time with Reddit.”
For Ohanian, part of the draw of returning to Reddit, which he calls “this baby I’ve watched grow for the last ten years,” is getting its house in order after months of negative press. Aside from personnel issues, Reddit received heavy criticism over its initial reluctance to police a sub-community dedicated to sharing nude photographs of celebrities — some of them minors — that were obtained by hackers targeting users of Apple’s iCloud cloud storage system. Reddit eventually took action against those communities following mounting pressure.
“While I do believe I’m going to bring, as a founder, a kind of stabilizing presence and vision for the company, I know I’m not the only one who has to get it right,” he said. “I’m going to do everything I can to help, and I think it will, but it’s going to take every one of us.”
“Ellen has done a tremendous job,” he acknowledged, “especially in this transition phase — not to mention in the last couple of years she’s been here — and the things that I excel at, the things that are my strengths, are things that compliment her strengths and what she excels at. And so we’re still going to do a CEO search, but it really is her job to lose. I want to see this company do amazing things, and I think Ellen is the person to get us on that path.”