Some hires and the chilling effects thing are maybe the biggest unambiguous positive developments. The subreddit banning and the salary negotiations thing were received with mixed opinion, but even if you agree with what was banned, the handling of it was questionable and seemed very rushed.
And then there was last week, which derailed the site over a weekend and made national news outlets for the whole week. A lot of details about internal dealings came to light, and none of them particularly painted reddit in a good light. There is no plausible way the amount of good shes done in the last 10-12 months outweighed the massive damage that was inflicted.
It is also worth noting that the people who do have access to a lot of internal information about the inner workings of reddit 'mutually' agreed that she shouldn't be the CEO. Undoubtedly the backlash -- some of it misguided -- played into this, but frankly a large part of being the CEO of a community-based site is PR.
No plausible way the day to day internal changes / hirings / firings that you are not privy to have had a balancing effect on this? What was your methodology in assessing the damage that the blackout caused to reddit that you used to measure against the good she could have plausibly caused in order to form your rational opinion? A cursory look at https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/about/traffic does not seem to indicate any lasting impact.
It is not worth noting that random employees (actually, not random: ones who' have enough of an axe to grind that they'll risk their job to break NDA) think a CEO is bad. That is the case at almost every company, small and large. Find me one where you can't find 2 employees that agree there should be a different CEO etc.
Sorry but we are looking at it from a necessarily uninformed outsider's perspective so we can't possibly have a meaningful opinion on whether she was an effective CEO.
And even if I was an employee; well there are always disgruntled employees, their opinion isn't reasonable either.
These are absurd arguments. By the same logic, the CEO of whole foods could hold a press conference and just go on a racist, hateful rant, and I couldn't possibly have a meaningful opinion on their effectiveness as a CEO.
In any event, the people I meant who did have the internal data weren't employees, I meant their board of directors.
And is it possible that a CEO is really awesome, but really really unlucky, and it just _looks_ like they are bad at their job outwardly? Sure, there is some non-zero chance of this; much like there is some non-zero chance of damn near anything.
Perfect information is an impossible ideal; arguing that a rational opinion is impossible regardless of any circumstance since we don't have access to all the information which exists would imply that no person can have a rational opinion about anything, ever.
And yes, literally it is true that the CEO of whole foods could go on a huge racist rant and you could not have a meaningful opinion on their effectiveness as CEO. Or rather, what you want to say is "in this extreme example, this CEO is clearly ineffective", but we know of morally shitty CEOs who drive huge company growth & profits and are therefore effective CEOs.
Anyway, can you show your work that you were referring to behind your analysis of the magnitude of the damage that the recent reddit blackout did?
More substantially, if all AMA teams really are going to be running the show without official reddit support, this cuts in a couple of ways. It shows a maintained lack of faith in reddit from the moderators, and it also is going to make the logistics of AMAs more difficult. The AMAs are unique content which is a substantial draw of new users, where a ton of the work was already done by volunteers. The logistical strain is going to make for less or worse content, pick your poison. High profile guests, especially those not technically savvy, are less likely to participate without admin support being available.
Strategically, reddit almost certainly wants to be involved in this -- they want to be tightly coupled, enough that the group can't spin off their own version.
I don't think this damage is irreparable, but I do think it's going to take substantial work to fix. And I mean, don't take that from me, take it from them -- https://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/3cbo4m/we_ap....
The main issue (no one to coordinate AMAs) was dealt with in a matter of hours without serious consequences. The "monumental cluster fuck" image is due to hundreds of people with an axe to grind who piled up on top it, mostly with unrelated "anti-SJW" complaints.