A few days ago we heard news that interim Reddit CEO Ellen Pao had resigned from the community, now Chief Engineer Bethanye Blount has chosen to leave as well, just two months after joining, raising several questions about the site’s future.
There has been some discomfort among the management of the popular site of late, which all seemingly started by the firing of the Ask Me Anything thread’s coordinator, Victoria Taylor. This brought a lot of heat on the recently departed CEO Ellen Pao at the time, who finally buckled under the pressure and resigned. Just a few days after her resignation, it was the turn of the Chief Engineer Bethanye Blount to leave.
Blount said the reason for her departure was her lack of confidence in achieving the unrealistic goals the website was setting for itself. She said that the community was making some promises which were unrealistic and would be very difficult to achieve. She was of course referring to new tools for helping subreddit moderators and solving the issue of harassing comments and content.
Blount previously found the startup MailRank, which was bought by Facebook in 2011, where she worked up until two months ago when she was hired by Reddit.
A twitter user tweeted about how Bethanye lost faith in Reddit, to which she sent out a good reply about Reddit, saying it had some good people and she wishes them all the best. But she had some concerns and a lot of work had to be done.
She also tweeted that it was time for her to start something new. Start another company; write some code, all her favorite things.