Reddit Unrest Continues With Petition to Remove CEO Ellen Pao

Reddit has always prided itself on being a site without censorship. So long as a Subreddit (user created communities on Reddit) did not violate any laws or Reddit site rules, then they could exist on just about any topic you could imagine, even those that are considered too extreme for other social sites.

From the Reddit communities perspective, all that changed in November 2014, when Ellen Pao took over as interim CEO for Reddit.

In March of 2015, users alleged that she was having negative posts about her lawsuit and her husbands legal issues removed from Reddit. Then in June 2015, she made the decision to ban 5 Subreddits, citing their new anti-harassment rules.

Last week, Reddit had the largest revolt (protest) to date in response to the poorly handled firing of Victoria Taylor, who was very popular amongst the mods and users. To show support for Victoria and to show their unhappiness with both how her firing was communicated and the lack of tools for moderators, the mods turned most of the popular Subreddits private, essentially making an estimated 75% of Reddit dark to regular users.

Now there is a petition demanding that Ellen Pao step down as interim CEO of Reddit, and it has over 205,000 190,000 signatures and climbing.

It is hard to say whether this petition will have any impact, but it definitely says something about who the users feel is responsible for the recent changes in how Reddit is handling censorship as a whole.

UPDATE: Within a week Reddit’s revolt over the firing of Victoria Taylor, Ellen Pao steps down as Reddit CEO.