Beleaguered Reddit CEO Ellen Pao has admitted her team has "screwed up" for "several years", amid furious criticism of her management of recent crises.
Pao has been under intense pressure from within Reddit's 30-million strong army of monthly users for various controversies, which have included banning a handful of abusive subReddits and the firing of popular AMA co-ordinator Victoria Taylor.
In response to the latter some of the site's most popular forums turned "private" last week, effectively pulling their content from the critical front page. Those subReddits are now mostly public again, but Pao has been lambasted for the perception that she communicates through statements and interviews to the press rather than with the community directly. Some of that criticism has been crude or even violent when directed at Pao personally, but the anger felt by many across Reddit's complex stratified community is real.
In an attempt to quell those concerns -- which have seen 180,000 people sign a petition calling on her to resign -- Pao finally posted a message on Reddit itself in which she admitted she and her team had consistently failed to meet expectations.
"We screwed up," she wrote under a post titled "we apologise". "Not just on July 2, but also over the past several years. We haven't communicated well, and we have surprised moderators and the community with big changes. "We have apologized and made promises to you, the moderators and the community, over many years, but time and again, we haven't delivered on them. When you've had feedback or requests, we haven't always been responsive. The mods and the community have lost trust in me and in us, the administrators of reddit. "Today, we acknowledge this long history of mistakes. We are grateful for all you do for reddit, and the buck stops with me."
To deal with those issues -- both real and perceived -- Pao said the site would take "three concrete steps". They include new tools to give mods better powers to run their pages, new types of outreach for mods including a newly-appointed Moderator Advocate, ("We're also going to figure out the best way for more administrators, including myself, to talk more often with the whole community") and the option for mods to use the old version of site search. "I mean it when I say we screwed up, and we want to have a meaningful ongoing discussion," Pao said. "I know we've drifted out of touch with the community as we've grown and added more people, and we want to connect more. I and the team are committed to talking more often with the community, starting now."
To what extent the apology and post have mollified the criticism of Pao is impossible to determine, though a cursory reading of the 19,000+ comments on the apology indicate the community will need more than a short post and a couple of hours follow-up to rally behind Pao and address the site's more fundamental problems.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
