Embattled reddit CEO Ellen Pao has stepped down from her position at the privately held company, effective immediately. A spokesperson for reddit indicated that the separation was mutually agreed upon and that Pao will be replaced by original reddit CEO and co-founder Steve Huffman. According to the New York Times, Pao will continue to advise reddit's board until the end of the year.

In an interview with Re/code's Kara Swisher, Pao is quoted as saying that her departure stems from a disagreement with reddit's board of directors on the direction reddit should go. "They had a more aggressive view than I did," said Pao.

In her own statement posted to reddit, Pao had good and bad things to say about her tenure. "In my eight months as reddit’s CEO, I’ve seen the good, the bad and the ugly on reddit. The good has been off-the-wall inspiring, and the ugly made me doubt humanity."

The resignation comes one week after a massive user-led protest left large swaths of the site inaccessible to the public. The protest was sparked by the firing of Victoria Taylor, a reddit employee who facilitated the site’s "Ask Me Anything" question-and-answer chats (called "AMAs"). Volunteer moderators of the /r/IAmA subreddit took the discussion area offline to try to figure out a way forward without Taylor’s help, characterizing Taylor’s dismissal as the latest in a long string of poorly communicated moves by reddit’s administrators. Other subreddit moderators quickly followed suit in a show of solidarity, and by last Thursday evening, one-third of the site’s "default" subreddits were inaccessible.

Management was initially slow to react to the unrest (with reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian making at least one glib comment, for which he later apologized), but by Monday morning, reddit had issued an apology in the form of a post by Pao titled "We apologize." The apology post laid out several promises about how reddit’s management wanted to move forward, but user unrest continued; a petition on Change.org for Pao’s removal stands at about 213,000 signatures as of this writing (with about 200,000 of those signatures coming in the last week).

Detractors pointed out that the responses made by Pao echoed promises that had been made and broken in the past. A large number of posters held Pao responsible for what they perceived to be detrimental changes to reddit’s direction, from an uncensored platform for discussion to a more mainstream-friendly place with less tolerance for harassing speech.

Meanwhile, Victoria Taylor, the reddit employee whose dismissal proved to be the straw that broke the camel’s back, posted her first public comment this past Thursday. She didn’t address the reasons behind her firing—something that reddit has also refused to comment on—but she did say that she’s doing well.

In a public statement (and reddit post) released this afternoon, reddit board head Sam Altman praised Pao. "We are thankful for Ellen’s many contributions to reddit and the technology industry generally," he said. "She brought focus to chaos, recruited a world-class team of executives, and drove growth. She brought a face to reddit that changed perceptions and is a pioneer for women in the tech industry. She will remain as an advisor to the board through the end of 2015. I look forward to seeing the great things she does beyond that."

The statement went on to explain that reddit's user and moderator community "deserve clarity about what the content policy of reddit is going to be" and that under Huffman's leadership, reddit will "create guidelines to both preserve the integrity of reddit and to maintain reddit as the place where the most open and honest conversations with the entire world can happen."

Ars Technica and reddit share a parent company in Advance Publications.