"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."

Comments

Your biggest screw up

[NotDrWho]

Hiring Ellen Pao.

Re:Your biggest screw up

[Karmashock]

Pretty much. Think of how bad it has to be for her to actually be admitting fault? We're talking about a chick that fired people that had to go off to chemo.

If she's apologizing it means that she's afraid. And at this point given her long series of unacceptable moves... that's just blood in the water.

Re:Your biggest screw up

[TWX]

The biggest problem is that they are running a web site that caters to ignorant and petulant children who believe they know all there is to know and deserve all there is to have.

No, the biggest problem is attempting to monetize a fairly long-established platform that is highly dependent on volunteers, who do not appreciate being disrespected despite their commitment, coupled with participants that do not like changes in things that they have grown accustomed to. It's further complicated by most companies' desire to grow, but to grow they have to get rid of elements of their businesses or customer base that detract from outside investment. Slashdot has experienced that last aspect, as has Fark, and Digg, and many other aggregation services. Many of these entities do not survive their attempt to morph into the mainstream, yet everyone still tries.

Without even looking at the individual people manage or working for them, Reddit screwed up. They've tried to change too many things too quickly and have taken their moderation staff and user base for-granted. They've also completely failed to consider that just as quickly a one website may rise to prominence, another may equally quickly supplant it. Look at Facebook replacing MySpace for example. Reddit may well find its users going elsewhere if someone else manages to build something that they find familiar without all of the current baggage.

Re:Your biggest screw up

[Karmashock]

Possibly... but for it to be issued at all is a first out of her so far as I know.

Reddit was started as an experiment in free speech.

To the extent I care about this at all, it is in that context. I want the internet to be free for people to say whatever they want.

Anything from criticism of those in power to calling some random twit a cocktoddler. The fat shaming board was gross... I get no joy out of making fun of other people's misfortunes that haven't done anything to me. But... I wouldn't ban or censor speech.

This whole different between punching up or down... It doesn't matter. Everyone has a right to speak and think whatever they want. You don't like what someone has to say... then use your right to speak to say so and use your right to think to judge them. But you don't censor them.

My issue with Pao is that she's got no problem with censorship. And all things being equal nothing else matters to me on the topic.

Re:Your biggest screw up

[MachineShedFred]

Yeah, no.

An apology just means that there was a significant enough signal to trigger a publicity action. The real apology is "we're sorry that you don't approve of things we're doing" not "we're sorry that we did things you don't approve of."

Re:Your biggest screw up

[slashdot_commentator]

No, the biggest problem is attempting to monetize a fairly long-established platform that is highly dependent on volunteers, who do not appreciate being disrespected despite their commitment, coupled with participants that do not like changes in things that they have grown accustomed to.

No, its not even that. The biggest problem is that neither Ellen Pao (current CEO), nor co-founder Alex Ohanian actually understand how their product works! They do not understand the operation of their own business.

These mods do the grunt work (for free). They eat their own reddit dogfood. Not only did management remove the only person (from the mods POV) that actually grasped how to PROPERLY do the operation, management didn't even understand that there had to be a replacement plan already in place. You can only understand this if you've ever worked in a department where a radical change has been made, and you knew that the change absolutely could not work. Most of the time, you don't have points in the company, so you just start polishing your resume and start making popcorn for the disaster flick that is about to commence. But these people aren't paid; they do it for their love of the finished product. What management did was take their many hours of unpaid work, kill the beautiful thing they created, and watch the killers plant a zombie parasite into it, and expect to see their dead masterpiece masquerading as the real thing. The mods then reacted in the only manner which they could.

That's what made n0thing's (Ohanian) attempt at damage control so damaging. It wasn't that Ohanian was inappropriately flippant. It was that the answers he gave to pointed questions demonstrated that he didn't have a clue what management did wrong.

My source of disgust is directed towards the tech media punditry. Because what they're demonstrating is that they don't have a clue what reddit management did wrong. They're just either covering up management's (Pao's) fuckup in the name of professional "sisterhood", or just care about how another startup is going to have lost investor money.

Resignation?

[grasshoppa]

Unless that's followed by her resignation, it's a whole lot of horse crap.

Wow. Lip service!

[Chas]

Basically unless they rehire Taylor or Pao steps down, this is just a bunch of community knob-slobbery with no actual value behind it whatsoever.

Too little too late

[Wee]

She was all over other media outlets over the weekend, and only just now makes vague promises about "tools". Hopefully those won't go the way of the "transparency!" promises they made earlier. People are apparently rather unhappy. But the good news is that Ellen Pao thinks that her users don't care, and the ones who are raising a fuss are insignificant. That's the way to make the moderators (which are basically unpaid employees) happy, Ellen!

Her management style reeks of VC meddling. It's all sanitize and monetize now. Weird shadowbanning, giving some offensive subreddits the boot but not others, etc.

I predict a gradual exodus. The cool kids tend to move on anyway once their parents have arrived.

-B

Apologizing for the Catalyst

[xafan]

This latest issue with firing a beloved director (Victoria) was only the catalyst for the rage against Ellen Pao. She comes in as an interim CEO, brings a ton of baggage in the form of her life-long scam artist husband and her own false claims of gender discrimination, proceeds to enforce selective and personally-driven censorship, and then finally fires one of the most community involved employees of reddit. It doesn't help that the rumors over the cause of Victoria's firing was due to her refusing to delete legitimate questions during Jesse Jackson's AMA.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:Sad

[Hevel-Varik]

It was a user driven site. The users provided much of the value. The users were pissed off. The users struck back. Now the business is scared. What's the problem?

Re:Sad

[Gramie2]

Reddit is absolutely allowed to manage their employees as they see fit. The mods of Reddit, in turn, are allowed to exercise the powers that Reddit has given them, and to express their discontent.

Reddit is free to dispense with the services of mods and pay people to monitor and moderate all the conversations that go on, so that the corporation can maintain complete control. If they want to take advantage of the time and effort of volunteers (how many? thousands?), then they have to work cooperatively with those volunteers.

Sorta like Dice and BETA?

[Bugler412]

Among other things, sounds like Slashdot's current owners are on a similar path...

Re:Wow. Lip service!

[TWX]

It is very easy to make words, it is very difficult to back those words up with anything of meaning. These are just platitudes unless they actually follow up with something, and they're probably not going to do that.

Re:Sad

[TWX]

I don't think in Reddit's case that it really is. The elements of the site that allowed them to expand it to its current size are not conducive to building it any larger, and there's not enough other mainstream usage to offset the loss of those elements when they can continue to disrupt the rest of site for an extended period of time.

This is sort of Slashdot's problem too; there's an upper bound on how much traffic geek news can drive, and rather than being content to have the best geek-news site such that it draws the most traffic from this niche, they keep trying to introduce non-geek elements, which causes userbase angst, drives away newcomers, and drives away existing users who feel that the site is diluted.

Until sites stop trying to be most or all things to most or all people this will continue to be a problem for them.