Leader apologizes amid Reddit uproar
After widespread user outrage over an abrupt employee dismissal at Reddit last week, Ellen Pao, interim chief executive of the online message board, apologized to the site’s members for what she characterized as a history of broken promises and poor communication.
“We screwed up. Not just on July 2, but also over the past several years,” Pao said in a post Monday to a Reddit forum. “The mods” — moderators — “and the community have lost trust in me and in us, the administrators of Reddit.”
Large sections of the site were temporarily taken offline by users last week. The action was a protest by users after they discovered last Thursday that Victoria Taylor, a well-liked Reddit employee, was dismissed with no warning to the community at large.
Reddit, a 10-year-old company based in San Francisco, is composed of topic-based forums, known as subreddits, where discussions take place on subjects ranging from news to technology. Subreddits also host impromptu question-and-answer sessions with public figures like Bill Gates and President Barack Obama.
The company has 70 to 80 employees and relies largely upon its thousands of dedicated power users to govern the site. Reddit regularly has more than 160 million visitors in a month.
After Taylor’s departure from Reddit, hundreds of messages supporting her appeared.
“The admins didn’t realize how much we rely on Victoria,” wrote one user, who goes by the user name Karmanaut. “We all had the rug ripped out from under us and feel betrayed.”
In an interview last week, Pao and Alexis Ohanian, co-founder and executive chairman of Reddit, did not give a reason for Taylor’s dismissal. But the two apologized for the way the company had handled what it called “a transition.”
That did not placate many Reddit power users and so-called moderators of the site, who have repeatedly stated that Reddit management has shown poor communication for years. Pao, in particular, has been a target for personal attacks, many of them racist and misogynistic in nature.
More than 130,000 people have signed a petition seeking Pao’s removal. The petition, posted four weeks ago, said Pao should be removed because a majority of users believe she “overstepped her boundaries and fears that she will run Reddit into the ground.”