Last Thursday, the firing of a well-respected reddit employee responsible for facilitating the site’s famous "Ask Me Anything" posts proved to be the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back, as dozens of the site’s discussion areas were taken offline by moderators in protest. The first subreddit to go offline was the "Ask Me Anything" subreddit at /r/IAmA, primarily so that moderators could figure out what to do after the firing; it was joined over the course of the next twelve hours by more than 200 other subreddits. The protest wasn’t necessarily about Taylor’s firing but rather in response to what the unpaid army of volunteer moderators characterized as a long history of neglect and miscommunication by "the admins"—reddit management.
Though reddit CEO Ellen Pao posted several responses to the protest, they were quickly downvoted into invisibility by angry users. Shortly after noon central time today, Pao made a top-level post to the /r/announcements subreddit, which was quickly voted up to the front page. The post’s title: "We apologize."
"We screwed up," the post begins bluntly. "Not just on July 2, 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."
The discussion in the apology’s thread also addresses a key point of contention: who will handle AMAs going forward. In the first post to /r/IAmA when it was brought back online, the moderators flatly stated that they would not be working with reddit management. "...We will no longer be working with the admins to put together AMAs," reads the post. "Anyone seeking to schedule an AMA can simply message the moderators or e-mail us at AMAVerify@gmail.com, and we'd be happy to assist and help prepare them for the AMA in any way."
A note appended to the post on July 5 said that reddit management would be working with the moderators—but only in a limited, "hands off" fashion.
reddit co-founder Alex Ohanian agreed with this a few steps below Pao’s post. "With our announcement on Friday, we're phasing out our role being in-between interesting people and the reddit audience so that we can focus on helping remarkable people become redditors, not just stop by on a press tour… We're still introducing and sourcing talent for AMAs, just now giving the moderators the autonomy to conduct them themselves." Separately from the main apology thread, Ohanian has also apologized multiple times for his flip comments last week as the crisis unfolded.
In addition to clarifying how AMAs will work, Pao also explained that reddit is tasking full-time employee Kristine Fasnacht (/u/krispykrackers) as "Moderator Advocate." Presumably, this role will provide a single point of contact for the unpaid volunteer moderator army to request assistance from site administration for things they cannot do on their own (which includes pulling metrics and analytics for their subreddits).
Apologies at this point are a good thing, but Pao’s comment about lost trust definitely isn’t baseless; a petition on Change.org for Pao’s removal as CEO has gathered more than 170,000 signatures (about 160,000 of which were added since Thursday evening).
Disclaimer: As noted on the previous story, Ars and reddit are both owned by the same parent organization, Advance Publications.
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