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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."
Eh, who cares. Does anybody actually still look at that web site? Honestly I barely knew it was still around.
Funny, that is what people are usually saying about this website. Hell, a while back slashdot's own Rob Malda made CNN's list of 10 people who don't matter.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Hello there. I see you are using the reddit cliche "educate yourself", and since you did not end you comment is some form of you have outed yourself as one of the "petulant children" who infest reddit like the plague. Now please make a gif of your dozen cats siding with you against my post.
My favorite "apology" is the back-handed "We're sorry you misunderstood us" variety. But the "Mistakes were made (by someone presumably), but we're listening" "apology" is good too.
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
It wouldn't surprise me in the slightest. Ellen Pao is, by many accounts, an abysmal manager and a CEO who appears to lack vision and/or a plan -- which are two things a CEO absolutely must have. Her handling of Victoria's dismissal is pretty clear evidence of that. A 20-something night manager of a McDonalds on the interstate could have handled letting an employee go better than she did.
We're talking about someone who doesn't even know how to use her own product (she once posted a submission that linked to one of her private PMs) and can't even apologize on her own site before going to the media to try to put out fires. She's apparently got dodgy ideas about race and sexism (her failed lawsuit against KP, banning certain subreddits). So an influential black leader gets pissy over a PR stunt that went bad and demands some action? Sure, I could see Pao reacting by firing the most high-profile and well-liked employee at the company without having a contingency plan in place.
-B
Ash and Hickory, straight-grained and true, make excellent bludgeons, dandy for the cudgeling of vegetarians.
From what I know, it probably had nothing to do with it (I won't eliminate the possibility). Apparently, Reddit was trying to consolidate its offices in San Francisco and closed its New York office. Victoria was the only admin or other important person there, so they fired her in the course of this closing. They somehow did this without giving any warning that they were shutting down these offices. Or even the possibility of allowing her to work from home.
There have been other accusations that Victoria prevented Reddit form monetizing the AMAs. She basically forced the subjects to post themselves (no PR firms or go-betweens) and answer some tough questions.
So, it comes down to either incompetence or greed. Probably both.
Maybe because no one wants to spend money advertising on a site associated with sexist, racist, immature dudebros.
The fact that you use "dude" and "bro" as pejorative terms shows that you're the sexist one.
I agree in general with your philosophy of free speech, however, in this case, claiming that what reddit did is "censorship" is a bit misleading. This is Slashdot so I'm quite suprised you've been moderated so highly and that nobody has pointed it out yet; on the other hand perhaps many 'dotters just aren't aware of exactly what happened.
The /r/fatpeoplehate (FPH) subreddit wasn't closed because the community and admins don't like the crap they spew. That would have been censorship, but that's not why the subreddit was closed. FPH was closed because its subscribers started spreading their hate into other subreddits and harassing other users via private messages. reddit was fine with FPH existing and being content with sharing their hate with each other, and they did for a long time. But recently they broke the rules, so they got their subreddit taken away.
That's not censorship, that's compartmentalisation. FPH was allowed to exist and to be dicks by themselves in their own little corner of reddit. That's the point of subreddits. Again, reddit knew about FPH and was OK with its crap as long as it kept to itself. Only after they tried to spread their bullshit was the subreddit closed.