Reddit CEO issues apology: ‘We screwed up’ – Yahoo7 Finance Australia

Reddit users want the head of CEO Ellen Pao over unfair labor practice and allegations that she unceremoniously terminated Victoria Taylor, who happened to be one of the firm’s most popular employees. “Once word of Taylor’s firing began to spread, moderators of other popular sections (called subreddits) that cover movies, science, gaming and a host of others, also went private, making much of Reddit essentially useless to regular site visitors”.

Like the CEO of any company, Pao has a mandate to make Reddit profitable.

“I’m sorry we let our community down yesterday…We should have informed our community moderators about the transition and worked through it with them”. Taylor was also Reddit’s director of talent and communications. “What we learned from this event is that we need to communicate better with them and that we don’t take them for granted”.

Taylor’s departure is not the only complaint many in the Reddit community have about Pao’s leadership abilities, Reddit moderator Gilgamesh explained in an online post. 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).

“We all had the rug ripped out from under us and feel betrayed”, said one of the AMA moderators in a separate message. “Along with their apologies were, again, empty promises to improve their communication with the community and provide tools for the moderators as they have promised to do so years ago”, the petition wrote in the update.

“I mean it when I say we screwed up, and we want to have a meaningful ongoing discussion”, Pao’s apology continued. The mods and the community have lost trust in me and in us, the administrators of reddit.

Pao has been a polarizing figure in Silicon Valley since filing a high-profile discrimination lawsuit against her ex- employer Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. Reddit CEO Ellen Pao-who doesn’t appear to be all that liked over at Reddit, given the number of posts (and petition signatures) calling for her removal-acknowledged this fact in a Friday post on the site.

Users believe that Pao is supporting “a new age of censorship” and will eventually “run Reddit into the ground”.

If anything, the closures reminded Reddit’s administrators just how essential their independent and volunteer moderators are.

What’s been made clear so far is Victoria won’t be coming back to Reddit and they will handle all this strife internally. While celebrities and politicians have taken part in AMAs – ranging from President Obama to Peter Dinklage of “Game of Thrones” – regular people who have accomplished or experienced something unusual or harrowing are also featured on the Q&As.