I'm surprised anyone agrees to be CEO of Reddit these days. No matter who holds the position, they always end up being vilified by both Reddit's users and its detractors.
I'm a big believer in Reddit, but NOT its current CEO, Steve Huffman, who has shown some horrible leadership. (See: how he handled third party apps.) He has to go.
I have no inside information on Reddit management, but as an outsider who's watched reddit grow over the years, I get the impression the core problem with Reddit right now is not Ellen Pao per se. Ellen Pao was brought in as a person to run Reddit as a business and make money and that's exactly what I presume she is trying to do, the issue here is the vision of the company as a whole, the people (investors, shareholders?) who thought Ellen Pao was a necessary and good candidate to be the CEO.
Investors, shareholders, founders, etc seem to have a very clear vision of turning Reddit into a money making machine, but no matter how you slice it this is not going to work out well with their community in the long run. It doesn't matter if Ellen Pao or Mark Cuban is the CEO as long their vision stays that way.
Not that there is anything wrong with a business wanting to make money, but in my humble opinion, Reddit is a particularly bad candidate for that and would be much better off adopting a non-profit model ala Wikipedia.
So who is actually running Reddit these days? Because a CEO involved in very high-profile personal litigation likely doesn't have the time to be a very effective CEO.
Some evidence to support your decision: The CEO of Reddit hasn't posted or commented on Reddit in almost a year. Same goes with most of the decision-makers. They're not users of their own product.
Why hasn’t the board of directors that governs Reddit taken action yet? They need to hire a new CEO ASAP before the site becomes another Digg and people leave.
What are Ellen Pao's qualifications for running a site like Reddit?
edit: what's up HN, this is a genuine question. I see that she's made a couple of mistakes that I'd qualify as 'tone deaf' but on the whole she could do a lot worse. What I am wondering about is how a position such as CEO of Reddit (which is first and foremost a community effort) is picked, it would seem to me that you would make a short-list of people with experience running communities and I miss the connection between Pao and Reddit on that front.
- You would prefer not to make your creation frustrating to use. (Of course, the team may think that their changes are better, but let’s assume that’s not the case)
- The board cares about ARPU and ARPU growth
- You’re stuck in the middle, and believe that you’re implementing it less terribly than your replacement would. So far, your biggest win here has been preserving old.reddit.com and API access, which consumed most of your political capital.
So, if you were Steve, what strategy would you propose and why?
Here's a template the Reddit CEO can use to immediately put a stop to this chaos:
"Hi Reddit, this is the CEO. I admit it, I didn't handle this well. Some of our recent decisions have not been met well by our users. There are great points being made, and I've decided to take this into consideration. Let's start over."
Have you signed the petition to remove the CEO of Reddit? Now you can make the cause visual with this "Now Hiring: Reddit CEO" campaign shirt. Order, take a photo, and share the campaign to create change. http://teespring.com/now-hiring-reddit-ceo
reply