What exactly "phenomenal" has she done? Reddit works pretty much the same as it worked several years ago, but in the meantime she managed to piss off the majority of community, which is the only reason Reddit exists
In the past few months Pao destroyed herself from the top of the mainstream media down to the deepest underground corners of Reddit. She's pissed off high-powered people in the SF investor community, the LA film community, and the NYC advertising community.
I suppose we just have to ignore these sorts of quotes as they feel like "getting biz done and avoiding lawsuits" and reserve judgment until she re-appears working for another YC company.
Basically they want to give something for news articles that doesn't further paint reddit management as being anti-women or something.
Do you really want Sam to speak honestly about Ellen in public and open himself and reddit up to a lawsuit?
Becoming a VC has become the new beginning of the end for any humanity left in a human being.
Not in the slightest, the majority could not care less about this ruckus and think those agitators are idiots.
Those people are a small, but vocal, minority.
Not everyone is obsessed with celebrity culture.
Yishan Wong was also a CEO (prior to Pao) having been an engineer at facebook. His tenure was also controversial although not as much as Pao.
I suspect she pissed off a very small, but very vocal minority. Most people (myself included) don't really know or care about Pao one way or the other.
My best guess is that she fought too hard to monetize by bringing a level of "mainstream" quality and standards to the site which would allow reddit to sell more and better ads (big complaint for advertisers: I don't want my products next to weird subs, etc.), which clearly was not well-received by the community BUT which the board may have encouraged, at least partially.
I see the backlash against Pao as a reaction to the wrong type of monetization form the communities perspective. Done by a CEO that seems to not have much of an understanding of what Reddit means to the people that use it.