Steve Huffman will be the company's next CEO

Jul 11, 2015 06:16 GMT  ·  By

The Reddit moderator revolt seems to have ended with the company's CEO, Ellen Pao, submitting her resignation yesterday.

If you haven't been keeping up with the news, you've just missed one of the Internet's biggest controversies that's surely going to go down in Internet lore.

The whole affair started over a week ago, at the start of July, when the company unexpectedly sacked Victoria Taylor, the coordinator of the website's most successful category, the AMA subreddit.

Let's call it the Victoria Taylor side-effect

The lack of transparency from Reddit's management annoyed and angered most of the site's moderators which went on a spree and took down over 300 of the most popular subreddits on the site.

While most topics were up and running after a day or so, the community's outburst over Victoria's firing left a serious rift between Reddit's management, moderators, and its users.

While Pao apologized this week for the unprofessional way in which she dismissed one of her employees and the company's lack of transparency, this came too little too late.

The damage was done and mods and users alike were asking for her head. Literally, since some of them actually went so far to threaten her life.

Despite having quite a successful tenure at the company, bringing Reddit amongst the top 50 sites on the Internet and creating an Internet juggernaut, Mrs. Pao was forced to submit her resignation in the end.

Steve Huffman will take her place as Reddit's new CEO

Sam Altman, Y Combinator CEO  and Reddit board member announced Steve Huffman, Reddit co-founder and its first CEO, will take over while Pao will remain on the Board of Directors as adviser through the rest of 2015.

"We were planning to run a CEO search here and talked about how Steve (who we assumed was unavailable) was the benchmark candidate," said Mr. Altman. "To our delight, it turned out our hypothetical benchmark candidate is the one actually taking the job."

Amongst the community, Steve Huffman is still revered as the man that truly built Reddit along with Alexis Ohanian, and for now, their thirst for Reddit management blood seems to have quieted down.