Four months after Ellen Pao’s loss in a gender-discrimination suit filed against a prominent venture capital firm turned her into a national symbol of the victims of workplace sexism, Pao resigned on Friday as interim CEO of Reddit, the online forum, after just eight months at the helm. According to Sam Altman, a board member, Pao’s departure resulted from “mutual agreement” and followed weeks of negotiation.

But the announcement came soon after Pao came under intense criticism for her role in the abrupt firing of Victoria Taylor, a popular Reddit employee, on July 2. Reddit announced that Steve Huffman, a co-founder of the company, would take over.

A decade after it launched, Reddit is one of the web’s most popular sites, boasting 160 million regular users. It crossed into the mainstream with its “Ask Me Anything” series in which celebrities engage in a question-and-answer session with ordinary Reddit users. The task of moderating the feature, which had attracted participants ranging from porn stars to President Obama, had belonged to Taylor, and had earned her widespread adulation within the Reddit community. But on July 1, an AMA with the Reverend Jesse Jackson descended into chaos, a mess of incendiary and offensive questions, incoherent answers, and a highly contentious argument over race relations. Reddit has denied that the episode led to Taylor’s dismissal, and Taylor, in her first public remarks , refused to elaborate on the reasons behind her termination.