Her optics at this point are terrible.

- CEO of a community-based site where the community doesn't like her (to put it nicely)

- Lost a very public lawsuit against a previous employer that revealed quite a bit about her personal and work habits -- and it wasn't exactly glowing, often downright damning.

- Tried to recoup legal costs for the lawsuit she started and lost

- Was ordered to pay legal costs to her former employer because of the wrongful lawsuit she brought against them

- spent most of the first parts of her Executiveship at reddit fooling around with the lawsuit

- It's strongly suspected that the damages she claimed in her lawsuit were to cover her husband's financial problems

- Her husband appears to be a real piece of work too

- Fired a community manager in the middle of a community event, regardless of the reason for firing her, it could have waited.

- and now fired a cancer patient

On top of these perceptual problems. She also doesn't appear to have any relevant leadership experience for running such a company. It's not like she worked her way up to the top position by starting in the mail room and through moxy and determination worked her way up through the management ranks.

She was a lawyer for 2 years, then spent about 3 years in BD/sales, then managed a BD team for a few years and then spent the rest of her time at Kleiner Perkins representing their VC investments before returning back to BD at reddit.

Basically she went from a very short career in law, to a career in BD. She has a total of 4 years of any kind of measurable management experience. A transition from BD to CEO is fairly unusual.

Somebody previously here on HN said it feels like reddit is being taken over by marketers, it's just as bad, it's being taken over by a Business Developer.

What's really going on here is that Ellen is trying to "clean up" reddit to make it more palatable as a strategic partner for other companies to work with. Reddit's wild-west reputation makes it difficult for many companies to work with them. This is what her focus is, probably with the ultimate goal of cleaning up the image for some kind of M&A. This is what BD people care about. Not about the ins and outs of running a company.

Reddit should be a much more valuable company, and I have a feeling the board is trying to pivot it into more of a sales channel for corporate partners to pump astroturfed advertisements to and to host special sales events or mod dedicated company/product subs for a fee. There's not much reason to continue to tolerate her at this point except that this is what they want.

It's kind of what Digg tried to do, and it may be inevitable for these kinds of narrow margin community-based sites that to start really capitalizing on the community, they go this way. But maybe they're hoping they can make the jump without screwing up as badly as Digg did. It's not looking that way however.

> The company is begging for a reddit clone to pop up and steal the users.

This has been true for a long time before Pao came on board. It's not really clear what the reddit devs seem to be doing, but empowering the mods to better manage their communities is not one of them. Something like Reddit is not terribly complicated software-wise, the large number of alternate communities (this one included) kind of goes to show it's an understood technology. It's basically a community-in-a-box at this point. The network effects will determine what happens next.

As far as these firings go, she can't reverse them. That kills any authority she may still have.