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Sunday, July 12, 2015

The New Reddit C.E.O.’s Many Challenges

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The New Reddit C.E.O.’s Many Challenges

Steve Huffman has just walked into what may be one of the most difficult jobs in Silicon Valley.
As the new chief executive of Reddit, the hugely popular online message board, Mr. Huffman is set to face intense scrutiny from the site’s users over even the tiniest management decision. And he has inherited ill will that has festered for years between a small staff and the millions of community members that make up, and largely govern, the site.
That much was reflected on Friday when Ellen Pao, a controversial figure in Silicon Valley, abruptly resigned from her position of interim chief executive of Reddit after just eight months. Hundreds of thousands of people had called for her to step down this month after what they considered to be the mishandling of an employee dismissal. The employee, Victoria Taylor, was beloved by the Reddit community, and users shut down parts of the message board in protest over her departure. Ms. Pao, who faced misogynistic and racist comments, eventually apologized for the incident.
Mr. Huffman, a co-founder of Reddit, was brought in to replace Ms. Pao at the behest of the San Francisco-based company’s board, who considered him to be the best manager and operator for the company.
“Reddit is this amazing and wonderful thing, and it’s only a fraction of what it can be,” Mr. Huffman said in an interview on Friday.
Mr. Huffman created Reddit in 2005 with his roommate and college friend, Alexis Ohanian, in a two-bedroom apartment in a suburb of Boston. The site consists of thousands of forums that host varying topics of discussion, from current affairs to video games to question-and-answer sessions with people such as President Obama. It is an online tour de force, with more than 160 million monthly visitors.
Mr. Huffman left the day-to-day operations of Reddit in 2009, three years after it was acquired by Advance Publications, and he went on to co-found Hipmunk, an online travel site where he will remain the chief technology officer.
The challenges Mr. Huffman faces at Reddit are numerous. Since the site’s inception, every chief executive of the company has faced intense scrutiny from users.
“Reddit’s definitely a lot more fun when you’re not running the place,” Yishan Wong, Reddit’s former chief executive who preceded Ms. Pao, wrote in a post to the site on Saturday.

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