THE CEO of a hugely popular social news site who publicly shamed a former employee has resigned from his job.

Reddit CEO Yishan Wong has resigned after two-and-a-half years in the job, the company announced on its official blog today.

Alexis Ohanian, one of the site’s co-founders, is returning to the company as executive chairman, while business partnerships strategist Ellen Pao will serve as interim CEO.

According to Sam Altman, company adviser and key investor, Mr Wong resigned after a disagreement with the board about a new office.

After raising more than $A57 million in funding in October, Reddit’s global employees were told they either had to relocate to San Francisco or leave.

“The reason was a disagreement with the board about a new office (location and amount of money to spend on a lease),” Mr Altman wrote on his blog.

“To be clear, though, we didn’t ask or suggest that he resign — he decided to when we didn’t approve the new office plan. We wish him the best and we’re thankful for the work he’s done to grow Reddit more than 5x.”

Writing on social media site Quora, Mr Wong explained his decision to leave. “The job as CEO of Reddit is incredibly stressful and draining,” he said.

“After two-and-a-half years, I’m basically completely worn out, and it was having significantly detrimental effects on my personal life. If anything, I probably pushed myself way too far.

“As a first-time CEO, all I knew was that such jobs are supposed to be stressful, so I never really had a good baseline, i.e. how stressful is too stressful, until multiple outside people and coaches I was working with remarked to me that I looked incredibly worn down for months on end and it wasn’t supposed to be this hard.”

However, The New York Times reports staff were uncomfortable after Mr Wong publicly shamed a former employee who hosted his own AMA, or ‘Ask Me Anything’, on the site.

The user known as ‘dehrmann’ said he had been sacked but given “officially no reason”, and speculated it was because he raised concerns with management about donating a percentage of ad revenue to charity.

In a blistering response which quickly went viral, Mr Wong jumped into the thread to smack down his former employee.

“You were fired for the following reasons,” he wrote. “1. Incompetence and not getting much work done; 2. Inappropriate or irrelevant comments/questions when interviewing candidates.

“3. Making incorrect comments in public about Reddit’s systems that you had very little knowledge of, even after having these errors pointed out by your peers and manager.

“4. Not taking feedback from your manager or other engineers about any of these when given to you, continuing to do #2 until we removed you from interviewing, and never improving at #1.”

Reddit, which now attracts more than 174 million monthly active visitors and regularly hosts Q&A sessions with major celebrities including Barack Obama, Bill Gates and Sir David Attenborough, has struggled to attract revenue to match its size.

“Yishan quintupled traffic for us in his two-and-a-half years at Reddit, and that’s no small feat,” Mr Ohanian told The New York Times. “Ultimately, companies have different needs for different leaders at different times in their history.”

frank.chung@news.com.au