Reddit bosses apologize after staff sacking leaves site in chaos

Kristine Fasnacht, a long-time Reddit user and current community manager at the site, will also take on the duty of being a liaison between moderators and the site’s staff. To protest her removal, volunteer moderators shut down hundreds of the site’s communities. At the time of writing, that petition had nearly 188,000 signatures toward its 200,000 signature goal.

Following the backlash to Ms Taylor’s sacking, Ms Pao released a statement saying “I want to apologise for how we handled the transition yesterday”. “We haven’t communicated well, and we have surprised moderators and the community with big changes”, she wrote in a Reddit post on Monday.

Victoria Taylor (known as “chooter” on the site) was responsible for arranging numerous Ask Me Anything Q&As, including one with Barack Obama, Channing Tatum and Julian Assange. Redditors believe she was sacked over a conflict of interest, involving Reddit’s new approach to AMAs.

“It’s an exciting job”. We hired someone to product manage it, and we moved an engineer to help work on it. We hired 5 more people for our community team in total to work with both the community and moderators. The petition, which was posted weeks before Taylor’s dismissal, accuses Pao of censorship and driving the website’s traffic into the ground.

So she did what anyone would do in her situation: she apologized for what caused the strife between her and her community.

The startup makes money by taking a small share of the employee’s salary when they get snapped up, and so far around 150 people have been signing up to the platform every week.

It recently appointed Ms Pao as chief executive and last month she banned five forums in a harassment crackdown .

While Reddit would not comment on the specifics of Taylor’s dismissal, the company said it was working on providing its moderators with a better infrastructure and support network. “We wouldn’t seriously consider any individuals for the CEO position unless they understood the community and were passionate about serving its needs”.

The petition has apparently no effect on Ms. Pao however. Similarly, Pao’s admission that Reddit’s inability to wrangle its own community forced it reach out to third-party media outlets to explain last weekend’s crisis suggests the company’s leadership has lost control of a site that is literally unraveling before our very eyes.

Pao and company co-founder Alexis Ohanian said Reddit would bring in a new moderator advocate, and that moderators will soon receive improved tools for chat facilitation, including “anti-brigading and better modmail/tools.” Taylor provided proof to the moderators that the celebrity answering questions was the person they claimed to be and not a third party answering on their behalf. “It is sad that they have resorted to the news rather than addressing us, their consumers”.