I think the idea that Pao has zero responsibility for Victoria's firing and thus the rage against her over the past week is completely unjustified is silly. Either she was involved with the decision to fire her and how to go about it and thus deserves at least as much blame as Alexis, or one of her subordinates fired one of the company's most well-known employees with no plan for how to go about handling her duties afterwards without her knowledge, and if something like that happens when you're the CEO of a company with a relatively small employee count without you having a clue you're doing something very wrong.
Alexis probably should be getting way more hate and pitchforks than he is, true. Part of the difference here is that, again, Pao was the CEO, and people tend to blame their issues with an organization on the most powerful/visible person in it. But the bigger one is that Alexis has been around Reddit forever- Redditors see him as One Of Us. Pao, on the other hand, didn't even seem to understand how Reddit worked when she first came on (most notably she tried to link to a private message in a comment) and in general has come off as One Of Them- one of the people who wants to make Reddit worse in order to make money off of it. This would have been true regardless of whether or not Pao had been someone who attracted the hate of the "anti-SJW" crowd or whatever you want to call it- that was a lot of fuel on the fire, sure, but the shitstorm and head-calling of the past week would have happened even if she had no history of, for lack of a better term, "SJW-ey" behavior. The nerds that have long since made up the core of the Reddit userbase are just the sort that naturally fear the things they love being milked dry and destroyed by people in suits. Hence the decision do replace Pao with one of the site's original founders- someone who the users will also see as One Of Us.
I mean, if you think that the FPH/GG/whatever else crowd made the rage against her over the past week stronger, I'd agree. If you think that she was ousted by some grand fucking conspiracy by that crowd to destroy her for daring to be a woman with power and that she did absolutely nothing wrong, you're way off the fucking rails. Recent drama aside,
of the 38 admins who have left Reddit since 2005, 23 have been within the last 9 months. Things have clearly been getting worse there, at least on the inside, it just wasn't that clearly visible until last week. And of course, while I'm sure there is some truth to the official reasons for her leaving, the idea that the shitstorm of the past week had nothing to do with it is fucking laughable, considering the timing. This drama was probably just the tipping point for it rather than the sole reason.
Really, though, the people who are probably truly at fault here are the board of directors as a whole. I don't think the trajectory of the site is really going to change until something big changes there.