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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.

At least Mr. Huffman, 31, will probably not face the same type of invective over race and gender that were regularly levied at Ms. Pao. She was also regularly criticized for her lack of communication with the site’s user base, as were many other employees. She had acknowledged earlier this month that Reddit managers had a history of broken promises and poor communication, and that users had lost trust in her and other administrators of the site.

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The exit of Ms. Taylor, who joined Reddit in 2013 as director of communications and talent and later collaborated closely with users for the site’s “ask me anything” section, was a breaking point for Reddit moderators because she was a main point of contact between the company’s employees and the site’s volunteers. While the exact circumstances of Ms. Taylor’s departure remain unclear, her dismissal increased concerns among Reddit moderators that executives cared little about keeping the community informed.

“We all had the rug ripped out from under us and feel betrayed,” Karmanaut, a Reddit moderator who worked regularly with Ms. Taylor, wrote in a Reddit post last week. “Before doing that, the admins really should have at least talked to us.”

On Saturday in a Reddit post, Mr. Huffman said improving relations with the community was a top goal, and that he planned to hold regular “ask me anything” question-and-answer sessions on the site.

Reddit had also languished in talent and technology, with little money for expansion. It was only in the last few years that Reddit was spun off from Advance, and raised two separate rounds of venture capital that it could use to grow.

In the interview on Friday, Mr. Huffman noted that the many unpaid volunteers who control the site have not been given the proper software tools to help expand and moderate their communities. And despite seeing a surge in traffic from smartphone users, the company has done little to improve its mobile web and app offerings.

“It hasn’t really changed in nearly 10 years,” he said. “It’s just this incredible platform, but there are a lot of technology issues holding it back.”

Mr. Huffman also must be deft in navigating how he will shape Reddit’s policies on what can be posted to the site. The issue was a contentious one that Ms. Pao and Yishan Wong, a former chief executive, regularly came under fire for during their respective tenures.

Ms. Pao stumbled with content policy in May, when the company decided to explicitly prohibit harassment on the site or using its forums to organize harassment. As a result of that change, Reddit banned five communities, or subreddits, on the site, including one dedicated to the ridicule of overweight people. For some, those changes were perceived as a form of censorship and the prohibition of free expression, contravening two pillars upon which Reddit was founded.

Mr. Huffman has not said whether Reddit will uphold its current content policies. But presenting his stance on what the policies should be is another top priority, he said.

“We will make it very clear what is and is not acceptable behavior on Reddit,” Mr. Huffman wrote in the Reddit post on Saturday. At least some of that, he said, will very likely include prohibiting illegal activity or posts that would cause harm or fear for one’s well-being.

Mr. Huffman will also be faced with improving the morale of Reddit’s battered staff, which numbers about 70. For most of this year, staff members have grappled with a loudly dissatisfied user base and, in some cases, witnessed their wrath.

“The Reddit team has been through a lot the past while,” Mr. Huffman wrote in his Reddit post. “I hope I can bring some stability.”