This article was exactly on point. If you think this is off-base then you've been living in a reddit filter bubble; the dialogue there is skewed toward outright slander and misogyny from the most juvenile perspective.
This person is speculating about the office politics of a site they actively dislike. I doubt that they have given it any thought, or even have any knowledge on the topic.
Insofar as they went along with the overall thrust of the "blackout", yes; that is support of a mysoginist agenda. However /r/science tried to sit on the fence by claiming they had to make their subreddit private due to its frequent collaboration with /r/IAma -- a reason which was nonsensical. None of this began until Reddit's administration indicated its intention to begin banning certain subreddits. The mindless culture of harassment and hate which has festered on reddit over the last couple of years couldn't tolerate a woman of color being behind this perceived attack on their majority-young-white-male "freedom". It's a joke to think that any of this would have happened with a white male as CEO.
How about an older white male, from a business background, who was openly trying to institute censorship and monetization and was unabashedly ignorant of Reddit culture? I'm fairly confident that a CEO like that would have been significantly more hated by Redditors. The issue wasn't race or gender, it was culture.
I'm not claiming the hatred for my hypothetical white male CEO would follow the same narrative pathways. I'm claiming that it's easy to imagine reddit hating a white male CEO as much or more than Ellen Pao.
I won't disagree that race and gender were used as part of that hatred, that's obviously the case. I think, though, that it's easy to mix up whether things are tools that people use to attack someone they already hate vs. reasons for hating them in the first place. I don't honestly know which it was in this case, but it's not hard for me to imagine that it was the former.
I agree that the Reddit "hivemind" does not hate a woman just for being a woman, and they can definitely hate a white man. I still think they are more likely to hate a woman. The hate against Ellen Pao started with her lawsuit which is related to her gender.
To take a hypotetical, let's say Reddit's CEO was a gay man who had sued a previous employer for something related to discrimination based on sexual orientation. I think Redditors would have been less negative about that, as Reddit is very pro gay rights. Then, when Victoria was fired I think the anger would have been less directed at the CEO personally and more towards the admin team as a whole, or at Reddit's owners.
We could also compare the recent banning of /r/fatpeoplehate with /r/jailbait earlier. People were upset about that too, but I cannot remember outright hate directed at the CEO personally.
I do agree with you about the racist posts. That seems like it's just a tool used to attack her.
Are you calling them juvenile and misogynist too?