Ellen Pao, interim CEO of the one of the web's most trafficked websites, Reddit.com, apologized to users on Monday after a weekend-long revolt calling for her resignation.
According to USA Today, the furor began on Thursday after it was reported that Reddit employee Victoria Taylor was fired.
Taylor was instrumental in coordinating Reddit's popular Ask Me Anything (AMA) forum, where everyday users can ask questions of celebrities, political leaders, and other notable figures — including past participants President Barack Obama, rapper Snoop Dogg, and "Jeopardy!" champion Ken Jennings.
Users initially thought that Taylor was fired after Wednesday's disastrous AMA with Jesse Jackson, wherein users bombarded him with questions like, "How is your relationship with the illegitimate child you fathered in 1998 while cheating on your wife?"
Some reports said that the firing was not connected to the Jackson AMA, and was instead connected with Taylor's unwillingness to commercialize the forum.
In any case, by Tuesday morning, a
Change.org petition calling for Pao's resignation had received more than 200,000 signatures.
"[Pao] was appointed interim CEO of Reddit Inc in November 2014 and Reddit entered into a new age of censorship," reads the petition.
"Pao lost her gender discrimination case against venture capital firm, Kleiner Perkins, on March 27, 2015. A vast majority of the Reddit community believes that Pao, 'a manipulative individual who will sue her way to the top,' has overstepped her boundaries and fears that she will run Reddit into the ground."
On Reddit itself, many users were not so kind, and referred to the interim CEO as "Chairman Pao," a reference to communist leader Mao Zedong.
Many administrators, both employed and volunteer admins, shut down many of the sites forums in a display of solidarity with Taylor.
The "Chairman Pao" epithet was born earlier this year during another revolt that followed after several Reddit forums were shuttered because of the site's new anti-harassment policy. Many criticized the new policy as censorious, and an example of political correctness run amok.
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