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"We Screwed Up," Says Reddit CEO In Formal Apology
An anonymous reader writes: After moderators locked up some of Reddit's most popular pages in protest against the dismissal of Victoria Taylor, and an online petition asking the company to fire CEO Ellen Pao reached more than 175,000 signatures over the weekend, Pao has issued an apology. The statement reads in part: "We screwed up. 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."
Clearly you don't understand how the site works. The moderators, the ones with the legitimate complaints, are not employees - they are users who "donate" their time to help run the site. The issue that caused all this was the firing of a Reddit employee who was a vital part of many of the subreddits. The main subreddit affected was AMA (Ask Me Anything). Victoria, the employee that was fired, was the key part in making sure that if an AMA thread is set up for person X, that person X can figure out how to use the site, that it is actually person X answering and not a proxy, and that everything goes smooth. Firing Victoria led to many of these prescheduled AMAs to have no way of happening. The Reddit admin should have either had someone already in place to take over her work and provide a seamless transition, or to at least finish the existing AMAs and only have her leave after the queue was cleared (or enough prior notice to cancel the ones scheduled later in the future). The moderators (again, not employees) revolted because it made their (volunteer) job difficult, and left them in a shitty position. They realized the best way to get things to change is to do something substantial. As a result, they shut down the subreddits they moderate (which already wouldn't be running without them), and got the attention of the CEO by rallying their users. If all they did was file a private complaint, then from the perspective of an outside, this story would look different. Instead, the moderators would be getting blamed for the failure to run the subreddits, and nothing would change.
What a piece of work.
http://www.vanityfair.com/styl...
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
And by doing so Reddit became "the front page of the Internet".
Except it's actually not, and titles like that lend credence to the view that Reddit users are entitled self-absorbed people in general.
Top sites on the internet, according to Alexa:
1. Google.com (note, this is the actual "front page of the internet")
2. Facebook.com (this could also be easily considered the "front page of the internet")
3. Youtube.com (yet another "front page" contender)
4. Baidu.com (how many Reddit users have ever seen the fourth most-used web site?)
5. Yahoo.com (almost literally "the front page of the internet" as the default home page for many people, much more popular than reddit.com)
6. Amazon.com
7. Wikipedia.org
8. Qq.com (I've only ever heard of this site in passing a few times, and it's still way more popular than reddit.com)
9. Taobao.com (shopping for Chinese folk)
10. Twitter.com (this site is used by Reddit users who want to express their righteous indignation)
11. Google.co.in (the Indian version of Google is significantly more popular than Reddit)
12. Live.com (apparently this is still a thing; significantly more popular than Reddit)
13. Sina.com.cn (Chinese messaging, apparently)
14. Linkedin.com (this is where Reddit moderators can find employment)
15. Weibo.com (this site is so Chinese that the Alexa description is written in Chinese; significantly more popular than Reddit)
16. Yahoo.co.jp (the Japanese version of Yahoo is also more popular than Reddit)
17. Google.co.jp
18. Ebay.com
19. Yandex.ru
20. Vk.com (Russian social network; more popular than Reddit)
21. Blogspot.com
22. Tmall.com (more Chinese shopping)
23. Google.de (German Google is more popular than Reddit)
24. Hao123.com (the only thing I know about this site is that it is more popular than Reddit)
25. T.co (a shorter twitter.com URL domain is more popular than Reddit)
26. Msn.com (this is a site built for the purpose of making Internet Explorer painfully slow to start; more popular than Reddit)
27. Instagram.com
28. Google.co.uk (the Google portal for the United Kingdom [pop. ~64 million] is more popular than Reddit)
29. Bing.com (search engine primarily used by people who don't know how to change the default search engine for IE; more popular than Reddit)
30. Amazon.co.jp (the Japanese Amazon portal is more popular than...)
31. Reddit.com ( "The Front Page Of The Internet!!!" claims its frenzied, self-important user base)
32. Google.com.br
So, there you go. Your "front page of the internet" is right there between Japanese Amazon and Brazilian Google. Now please excuse me if I don't give a shit what your CEO or user base are doing with their time.
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black