On Monday night, reddit's chief engineer, Bethanye Blount, resigned from her position after less than two months on the job. Blount said she decided to quit because she had lost confidence in the direction of the company.

As Re/code reported:

Blount said she left because she did not think she “could deliver on promises being made to the community.” “I feel like there are going be some big bumps on the road ahead for Reddit,” Blount said. “Along the way, there are some very aggressive implied promises being made to the community—in comments to mods, quotes from board members—and they’re going to have some pretty big challenges in meeting those implied promises.”

Blount, who previously worked at Facebook, may have been referring to promises to build “better tools for moderators” to “help keep subreddits and reddit awesome,” as Pao mentioned in a post after the firing of Victoria Taylor, a moderator who worked on the popular r/AMA subreddit.

The site has had a tumultuous few months, with reddit users protesting after interim CEO Ellen Pao, head of community and support Jessica Moreno, and reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian said in June that they would begin actively banning harassing subreddits. Many reddit users then began a campaign to get Pao to resign from her position as CEO and started subreddits dedicated to harassing Pao.

Then came the sudden firing of Taylor in early July, which led moderators of nearly a third of the site's default subreddits to set their communities to “private,” locking out all casual visitors in protest. Pao issued an apology a few days later (after Ohanian made at least one glib comment about the revolt). Ohanian later said that the reddit users' message had been received and asked that the locked subreddits be restored “immediately.”

Last Friday, Pao resigned, saying that she disagreed with reddit's board on the company's direction. "They had a more aggressive view than I did," Pao told Re/code. In a statement, reddit board member Sam Altman wrote that former reddit CEO Steve Huffman would be returning to lead the company, and he promised that reddit would build tools to keep the moderators happy. “Mods, you are what makes reddit great,” Altman wrote. “The reddit team, now with Steve, wants to do more for you. You deserve better moderation tools and better communication from the admins.”

Blount said on Monday that her departure was not related to gender or to Pao's departure, but she said that she believed Pao had been placed on a “glass cliff" (which Wikipedia defines as a term to describe “the phenomenon of women executives in the corporate world being likelier than men to be put in leadership roles during periods of crisis or downturn, when the chance of failure is highest”). Blount says she plans to start her own company.

Blount's departure comes as the company has been struggling to keep its subreddits in check and its administrators on the same page. Ohanian made a comment just after Pao resigned admitting that he was the one who wanted the AMA section rebooted, and Yishan Wong, former CEO of reddit just before Pao, took to the site on Sunday to accuse Alexis Ohanian of deciding to fire Taylor and then allowing Pao to take all the heat from reddit users (and there was a lot). Wong wrote:

Alexis wasn't some employee reporting to Pao, he was the Executive Chairman of the Board, i.e. Pao's boss. He had different ideas for AMAs, he didn't like Victoria's role, and decided to fire her. Pao wasn't able to do anything about it. In this case it shouldn't have traveled upstream to her, it came from above her. Then when the hate-train started up against Pao, Alexis should have been out front and center saying very clearly "Ellen Pao did not make this decision, I did." Instead, he just sat back and let her take the heat. That's a stunning lack of leadership and an incredibly shitty thing to do.

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