Interim Reddit CEO Ellen Pao apologized on Monday as she promised to improve communication between the website and its community of users.
“Today, we acknowledge this long history of mistakes. We are grateful for all you do for reddit, and the buck stops with me,” Pao said in a statement posted on the site. “The mods and the community have lost trust in me and in us, the administrators of reddit.”
Pao said the company is working on building tools for moderators and providing different search options and she also introduced a new liaison for moderators.
“I know we’ve drifted out of touch with the community,” she added. “I and the team are committed to talking more often with the community, starting now.”
The apology comes on the heels of a dispute that resulted in moderators shutting down many of the community’s most popular pages last week.
The site is up and running again, but the dispute is not yet settled.
An online petition calling for Pao to resign had collected 156,000 signatures by Monday morning. It had been started a month ago but had only about 10,000 signatures until the protests started late last week.
More than 100 subreddits on a wide variety of topics from gaming to movies to science were closed down by their moderators, unpaid volunteers who oversee those pages, as a protest over the dismissal of Victoria Taylor, Reddit’s director of talent and communications, who was let go on Thursday.
Taylor served as a liaison between the moderators and Reddit, and coordinated the site’s wildly popular Ask Me Anything (AMA) series, where celebrities, political leaders, pop culture icons or simply people with interesting stories would answer questions from the Reddit community. President Obama is among those who answered questions on AMA. 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.
One moderator who helped lead the protest against her outster, karmanaut, posted last week that “[t]he admins didn’t realise how much we rely on Victoria. Part of it is proof, of course: we know it’s legitimate when she’s sitting right there next to the person and can make them provide proof… for [Ask Me Anything] to work the way it currently does, we need Victoria. Without her, we need to figure out a different way for it to work.”
Reddit co-founder and executive chair Alexis Ohanian wrote a post to the community apologizing for making the change without better communication, and Pao also apologized in comments to NPR over the weekend.
“They should have been told earlier about the transition and we should have provided more detail on the transition plan,” she said, adding that Reddit was working on improved tools for moderators as well as expanding the management team.
But some of those who took the sites down last week expressed displeasure with the plans as presented by Reddit management.
“We have taken the day to try to understand how Reddit will seek to replace Victoria, and have unfortunately come to the conclusion that they do not have a plan that we can put our trust in,” read a post by some of the moderators. “The admins have refused to provide essential information about arranging and scheduling AMAs with their new ‘team.’…. As a result, we will no longer be working with the admins to put together AMAs.”
The post said moderators would schedule the Ask Me Anything sessions themselves in the future.