Reddit CEO Pao admits ‘We screwed up… over the past several years’
Reddit chief executive Ellen Pao has announced the site's top brass have repeatedly “screwed up” over the last few years when it comes to communicating site changes to moderators and users.
Pao is under the microscope after a petition calling for her to step down hit over 200,000 signatures in light of the Reddit recently clamping down on a number of abusive subReddits.
Acknowledging the issue, Pao posted on the site saying: “We screwed up. Not just on 2 July, 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.”
To clean up the site’s act, Pao reinforced three steps going forward. These were building new tools for Redditors to use, employing moderator advocates to communicate with those running subReddits and a possible return to old search versions to reduce moderator workloads.
Time will tell whether Reddit’s 30 million monthly users feel enough has been done to improve the situation at the company.