Reddit finally admits what everyone already knew

So Ellen Pao is out at Reddit. She announced it herself yesterday, in a post on the company blog, and by this morning it was pretty much confirmed that Steve Huffman, one of the original co-founders, is coming back as CEO. Alexis Ohanian, the other co-founder, is stepping into an executive chairman role. Its the kind of "back to the founders" move that always gets framed as a fresh start, and maybe it is one, but I've been reading Reddit since around 2009 and this whole saga has left a bad taste that a new org chart isn't going to wash out.

Quick recap for anyone who wasn't glued to their RSS reader last week: Victoria Taylor, who ran Reddit's AMA program (the interviews with famous people, scientists, whoever), got fired at the end of June with basically no explanation. The mods who volunteer their time running the big subreddits felt blindsided, because Taylor was the person who actually helped them coordinate those AMAs. In protest, a huge chunk of the default subreddits, the ones that show up for every new account automatically, went private. r/pics, r/videos, r/IAmA, r/gaming, r/askscience, even r/todayilearned. For a couple of days the front page of the internet was mostly just... gone dark, or filled with whatever smaller communities hadn't joined the blackout.

Then it turned into a pile-on against Pao personally, which is where I start feeling genuinely uncomfortable about the whole thing. There was a petition demanding she resign that picked up something like 200,000 signatures, and a lot of the commentary around it veered way past "this leadership decision was bad" into territory that had nothing to do with Taylor or the AMA program at all. Pao had already been dealing with an ugly gender discrimination lawsuit against her old firm Kleiner Perkins earlier this year, one she lost in court back in March, and I don't think it's a coincidence that a huge amount of the internet's fury landed on the one woman in the room rather than on, say, the board that presumably signed off on firing Taylor in the first place.

None of that means Pao ran the company perfectly. The Taylor firing really was handled badly, communication-wise, and Reddit's relationship with its volunteer mods has been fraying for a while now, this was just the moment it snapped. I mod a couple of tiny subreddits myself (nothing anyone's heard of, a few hundred subscribers), and even at that scale you can feel how little institutional support exists if something goes sideways. You're basically running unpaid customer service for a company that mostly forgets you exist until you're inconvenient.

What gets me is how predictable the "solution" is. Bring back a co-founder, a guy, and suddenly the temperature drops and everyone's ready to give the company the benefit of the doubt again. I like Huffman's writing well enough, spez has always come across as a genuine Reddit nerd rather than a suit, and maybe he really does understand the community in a way that helps. But it's hard not to notice the pattern where a woman gets brought in to make hard calls, takes the abuse for it, and then leaves so a founder can ride back in for the redemption arc.

I'll say this much for Reddit: even with all of this, I still open it more than I open Twitter most days. The comment threads on niche stuff, like the woodworking subreddit I lurk on when I'm procrastinating instead of writing blog posts, are still better than anything else on the internet for that kind of thing. That's the maddening part. The site is genuinely good at what it does and the people running it keep finding ways to make you root against them anyway.

Anyway. Curious to see if Huffman actually changes anything structural for the mods, or if this is just a face swap at the top while the same problems keep piling up underneath. I wouldn't bet money on the former.