Reddit Interim CEO Pao Resigns; Huffman Regains CEO Title
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
NEW YORK — Reddit said Friday that interim CEO Ellen Pao resigned from the company, and co-founder Steve Huffman is back as its CEO.
The freewheeling online discussion forum and news site, which says it had 164 million unique visitors last month, has been rocked by unrest recently. The firing of a popular staffer earlier this month upset some users, leading to volunteers shutting down parts of the site, and there have been protests over new policies intended to fight harassment.
A statement posted on Reddit by Reddit board member Sam Altman Friday said that Pao, who became interim CEO in November, resigned from Reddit by mutual agreement and will continue to advise the board for the rest of 2015.
Altman acknowledged that Reddit moderators should have better tools and communication from the company, but took some users to task for the nature of their comments about Pao.
He said Reddit accepts disagreements, but said the site must exercise compassion if it wants to be a great community and said some of the things Reddit users wrote about Pao were "sickening."
"Disagreements are fine. Death threats are not, are not covered under free speech, and will continue to get offending users banned," Altman wrote.
In an email, Pao said she resigned because Reddit’s board was asking for faster user growth than she could deliver while holding on to the site’s core values. She defended Reddit’s policy changes, saying that despite criticism, the new rules are making the community stronger.
"We’ve taken bold and often controversial stances, but always with the greater good of the community in mind," she said. "We tackled the thorny issues of harassment on the site, banning harassing behavior without censoring ideas. Though we came under fire on many fronts, we did not waver, working 24/7 to try to keep the site harassment-free."
In a statement posted to Reddit, Pao thanks users who were supportive, saying the positives from the site far outweighed the negatives, and she urged Redditors to "remember the human" behind the keyboard.
This month Reddit fired Victoria Taylor, who helped run the site’s popular "Ask Me Anything" feature, where Reddit users submit questions to celebrities and other notable people. President Barack Obama, for example, has answered questions on that forum. Some volunteer moderators protested her ouster by shutting down sections of the site, including Ask Me Anything.
Reddit also announced anti-harassment guidelines this year and in June it banned a few groups for violating those rules. Reddit is known for an almost-anything goes style, but leadership said in May that it was unhappy with harassment on its site and survey data showed its users were also upset about the behavior. The company apologized and said it would do a better job of communicating with moderators and users.
Early this year Reddit said it would remove photos, videos or links that featured explicit content if the person in the image didn’t give permission for it to be posted. That came months after hackers obtained nude photos of Jennifer Lawrence and other celebrities and posted them to Reddit, among other social media sites.
Huffman co-founded Reddit in 2005 with Alexis Ohanian. Conde Nast acquired Reddit the following year, and both Huffman and Ohanian left the company in October 2009. Ohanian returned as San Francisco-based Reddit’s executive chairman in November.
Before becoming Reddit’s CEO, Pao had worked for a storied Silicon Valley venture capital firm, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. She lost a high-profile gender discrimination lawsuit against Kleiner Perkins in March that brought up issues of the gender imbalance and difficulties faced by women working in Silicon Valley.
20萬人聯署 Reddit執行長辭職
控告矽谷創投公司性別歧視敗訴的鮑康如，已辭去網路論壇和新聞網站Reddit臨時執行長職務，因為她主持公司的方式受到用戶廣泛批評。
Reddit在10日宣布這項人事異動，宣稱鮑康如在雙方同意下辭職，由共同創辦人和原來的執行長哈夫曼取代。
開除女主管挨批
八個月前才加入這家公司的鮑康如，因開除很受歡迎的人才主管維多莉亞．泰勒受到激烈批評。泰勒極受Reddit勢力強大的監督者喜愛，這些監督者並非公司員工，可是對這個網站數以千計討論區擁有完全的編輯控制權。Reddit的信息板約有1億6000萬名活躍用戶。
許多用戶痛批鮑康如自己大張旗鼓提出性別歧視告訴，落得難堪的敗訴下場，卻立刻對Reddit的顯赫女主管開刀。
泰勒去職引起監督者反抗，連續幾天封鎖幾百個討論區。用戶也發動網路請願，要求鮑康如下台，並獲得超過20萬人連署。
鮑康如發文道歉
鮑康如本周貼文對泰勒遭到開除的方式道歉，承認她把事情搞砸了。
Reddit的聲明間接承認許多長期用戶對鮑康如不滿的癥結：她與社群不搭調。不過，聲明中也指責用戶對鮑康如的惡毒批評。
原文參照：
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2015/07/10/us/ap-us-reddit-ceo.html
2015-07-11．聯合晚報．B3．國際財經．國際新聞組
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