Reddit Got Its Founder Back. That Doesn't Fix What's Actually Wrong.

So Ellen Pao is out at Reddit. That happened Friday, and by now you've probably seen the news everywhere already, so I'm not going to rehash the whole timeline blow by blow. Short version for anyone who missed it: Victoria Taylor, the woman who ran the AMA program, got fired with basically no warning at the end of June, a few hundred subreddit moderators went dark in protest, a petition to remove Pao picked up something like 200,000 signatures, and last Friday she stepped down. Steve Huffman, one of the original cofounders, is back as CEO. Alexis Ohanian is now Executive Chairman.

I've been on reddit since maybe 2010, back when the whole site still felt like a slightly grubby clubhouse instead of the front page of the internet it keeps calling itself. And I want to be careful here because I think a lot of the pile-on against Pao specifically was uglier than it needed to be — some of it was just plain misogyny wearing a "corporate MBA doesn't get us" costume. But the underlying complaint, that the site's leadership has been making decisions with zero regard for the volunteer moderators who actually run the place, is completely fair. You cannot build a company on free labor for a decade and then act surprised when that labor organizes and pushes back.

What bugs me is the framing that's already showing up in the coverage this weekend, that this is a story with a villain and now the villain is gone and everything's fixed. It isn't. Huffman didn't leave in 2009 because reddit had too much money and stability. He left, Conde Nast spun it off with basically no independent funding for years, and the site has been chronically understaffed and under-tooled (is that a word? it should be) relative to its size ever since. The mod tools are still from another decade. AutoModerator is genuinely great but it's a community-built patch over infrastructure the company never bothered to fix. Bringing back a cofounder is a nice symbolic move and I actually think Huffman is a reasonable pick, better than most outsiders they could've hired. But symbolism doesn't ship code.

The thing I keep coming back to, sitting here with my coffee at like 11pm rewriting this paragraph for the third time, is how weirdly personal this whole blowup felt for something that's ostensibly about a management change at a mid-size tech company. People I follow who mod smallish subreddits, the kind with maybe eight or nine thousand subscribers, were genuinely losing sleep over this in early July. Not because Ellen Pao personally offended them but because their unpaid, unglamorous work of keeping a comment section from turning into a cesspool suddenly felt disposable. That's the real story buried under the CEO drama, and it's not going to get fixed by a leadership change alone.

I'll say one more slightly unpopular thing: I don't think the harassment-policy stuff Pao pushed through (banning some of the uglier hate subreddits back in June) was the wrong call, even though that's part of what fueled the backlash against her. A platform gets to decide what it hosts. People conflating "we don't want to host a subreddit organized around fat-shaming photos" with "free speech is dead" have always exhausted me a little. That criticism and the Victoria Taylor firing got mashed together into one big undifferentiated mob, which I think actually made it harder to take the legitimate mod complaints seriously.

Anyway. I still check reddit basically every day around lunch, usually while eating something sad at my desk, so obviously I'm not going anywhere. I just don't think Friday's announcement is the ending anybody's treating it as. Ask me again in six months whether the mod tools got any better.

Also, small unrelated aside: New Horizons is doing its Pluto flyby today, and I've had a tab open all afternoon waiting for the "phone home" signal tomorrow. Nine and a half years to get there. Kind of puts a website CEO shuffle in perspective, honestly.