[JohnBooty]

   If the default home page and /r/all can all 
   be flooded with posts about her, it's not 
   exactly a small group of extremists.

I don't think the numbers support that statement at all.

Reddit has roughly 1.5 million daily users. Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/about/traffic

It only takes about a thousand (net) upvotes to get something to the front page.

So a very small (less than 1%) portion of the visitors can very much get things like "fire Ellen" posts onto the front page, especially when there's no opposing block of voters.

(In other words, there were no passionate defenders of Pao who were eagerly downvoting the posts that trashed her. There were only anti-Pao zealots, and a much larger userbase that simply didn't care much at all. Count me in the latter, FWIW.)