Reddit: can anyone clean up the mess behind 'the front page of the internet'?

The social news site is almost as famous for its never-ending supply of creepy subforums as it is for memes, pictures and assorted lols. Can its new CEO change that? And should she?

When Ellen Pao became chief executive of the social news site Reddit in November 2014, few thought her tenure would change the make-up of the site that bills itself the "front page of the internet". Thrust into the limelight by the surprise resignation of the company's previous CEO Yishan Wong, Pao had only joined Reddit the previous year, working on building "strategic partnerships that benefit the community".

And yet just four months after starting, she has led the site through one of its biggest steps towards being the mainstream hub that that "front page" billing has always implied was its aim. In the wake of the vast cache of nude celebrity photos, leaked on 4chan but rapidly centered on "The Fappening", a Reddit subforum (or "subreddit") which swelled to millions of members before being shut down by the site's administrators, Reddit has banned "involuntary pornography" entirely.