Ellen Pao says sorry for ‘screwing up’ Reddit

An online petition calling for the resignation of Ellen Pao, Reddit‘s interim CEO, has attracted more than 130,000 signatures, growing rapidly in the past two days since the dismissal of a key administrator at the community-curated news site.

Taylor, who looked after Reddit’s popular Ask Me Anything section, was apparently sacked without explanation last week.

“We screwed up. Not just on July 2, but also over the past several years,” Pao said in a post to one of Reddit’s forums on Monday. This year, we have started building better tools for moderators and for admins to help keep subreddits and Reddit awesome, but our infrastructure is monolithic, and it is going to take some time. The Ask Me Anything series was a rather newsworthy feature of the site that included a question/answer session between celebrity, political subjects, pop culture personalities, and for any of those that decide to tell “interesting stories” to the community.

Absent an official reason for Taylor’s firing, some have begun to speculate that it was a reprisal for an AMA event with Rev. Jesse Jackson wherein he faced accusations of race baiting and appeared to dodge questions on improving race relations.

Over the weekend, several redditors shut down major sections of the site, or subreddits, in protest at the sudden and unexplained dismissal. A site as massive and user-driven as reddit should long have had Moderator Advocates in place-to say nothing of wider community advocates. So, she targets those people: “I know these are just words, and it may be hard for you to believe us”.

The apology closed with Pao saying, “I don’t have all the answers, and it will take time for us to deliver concrete results”. Our process won’t be flawless overnight, but we will refine it over time with the moderators (especially r/IAMA, r/science, r/books the most prolific communities for AMAs).

Moderators have a history of quarreling with Pao.

After Pao lost her gender discrimination case against venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins she was appointed CEO of Reddit Inc and Reddit entered into a new age of censorship. In this interview, she shared her thoughts on Reddit users protesting, and also apologized for the company’s actions.

“Alexis Ohanian (/u/kn0thing) has been working with us over the weekend to institute new protocols for how reddit will work with the mods of communities looking to hosts AMAs”.

Some moderators reacted by taking their subreddits offline, while users – so far, more than 180,000 – expressed their disapproval by signing a Change.org petition requesting Pao’s removal as Reddit CEO.

Pao’s apology may resonate with some of those users, but many remain dissatisfied.