
We apologize - nahiluhmot
https://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/3cbo4m/we_apologize/
======
westernmostcoy
Why did this apology come out today and not before Pao spoke to news outlets
about this topic? Why wouldn't you try to talk to your upset users quickly and
directly?

[http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/04/technology/reddit-
moderato...](http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/04/technology/reddit-moderators-
shut-down-parts-of-site-over-executives-dismissal.html)
[http://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2015/07/05/420...](http://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2015/07/05/420296522/reddit-
ceo-says-miscommunication-led-to-blackout-protest)

~~~
McGlockenshire
If you note her account's history, you might notice that _every single one_ of
her contributions has been mass-downvoted, including earlier responses on the
matter. Downvoted content gets hidden. There's an ongoing voting war over the
submission itself, with only 61% upvoting. That's way, way low for reddit.

Speculation: It's very possible that they decided to do press work first so
that the message would not be muted by downvote brigading. That's a stupid
thing to have to do, and has only served to upset even more people.

~~~
001sky
Can't they just 'pin' the CEO's post to the top?

This reeks of lack of imagination.

~~~
steveklabnik
Given the way this discussion has gone so far, then people will trash the
admins for "pushing content they want to the top of the page" or similar.

~~~
girvo
While I think the entire furore is completely misguided and utterly childish,
I doubt that would've been the case. Besides, they have a blog.

------
jeletonskelly
As someone who has been using reddit for nearly a decade, I can't help but
find this whole thing to be completely absurd. Mods are claiming they're the
backbone of the whole site, which is complete nonsense. It's the internet; one
person steps down, there are thousands to replace them... just like reddit and
other sites have always worked. The whole organized "blackout" just felt like
a bunch of people on a power trip who didn't want to step away because that
would be relinquishing some sort of internet "status." When did it get so
complicated?

~~~
smacktoward
_> Mods are claiming they're the backbone of the whole site, which is complete
nonsense. It's the internet; one person steps down, there are thousands to
replace them... just like reddit and other sites have always worked._

Perhaps we're seeing people slowly become aware of this fact. In any other
context, having given long hours of uncompensated labor to a for-profit entity
that views them as completely disposable is not something that most people
would feel great about.

~~~
chapium
Nor would most spend their time doing so.

------
jonjenk
This is a pretty shitty apology. The key problem is that ekjp isn't owning the
failures directly. Just look at the language in the post...

"We screwed up." "We haven’t communicated well..." "we acknowledge this long
history of mistakes..."

This type of language shows a lack of ownership and accountability of the
author. It's a huge red flag. If one of my employees wrote something like this
I would never have accepted it.

A good apology would have started with something like, "I am sorry."
Everything that happens at a company is ultimately the CEO's responsibility.
The language used in ekjp's apology does little to reassure me that she
actually feels like she owns the failures.

~~~
x0x0
Whatever you think of Ellen, she's been ceo since Nov 14. How exactly does
that makes her personally responsible for ongoing failures from multiple years
beforehand? Did she borrow a DeLorean and order the team around during
Yishan's tenure?

~~~
DanBC
And to be fair to her she does take responsibility:

> and the buck stops with me.

------
emehrkay
I like Reddit, a lot, but the community is shit. I read this apology and then
Ellen's reply and that has negative 55 hundred votes. They have no real reason
to dislike her. They have no real reason to be mad at the one woman being
fired. They're just coming off as a bunch of upset kids with some "authority"
in the form of votes or moderation.

As a casual user I have no need to dislike Ellen or feel slighted by the woman
being fired. But the hive have decided those are the things that the community
should do (and dislike Justin Beiber and Kanye West and whatever else), and
the community does it. I can't even get a straight answer as to why they're
upset.

Children are emotional.

~~~
psychometry
One look at the completely irrelevant second sentence of the petition to
remove her [1] should tell you everything to know about why users are actually
angry at her. This outcry would've been minor if reddit had a male CEO without
the failed lawsuit in the rear view mirror.

Reddit has harbored toxic subreddits for long enough that they've nurtured a
huge user base of racists and misogynists. It's a demographic crisis and it
apparently doesn't take much to incite these mobs. These vocal and active
users hated Pao before she became reddit CEO and these events were entirely
predictable.

[1] [https://www.change.org/p/ellen-k-pao-step-down-as-ceo-of-
red...](https://www.change.org/p/ellen-k-pao-step-down-as-ceo-of-reddit-inc)

~~~
fnordfnordfnord
It doesn't take a misogynist or a racist to be upset to see a well-liked
person fired abruptly, especially with no apparent cause. There is a lot of
stored-up discontent with the way Reddit is run, some of it even goes back to
when Yishan was CEO. It's a fool's errand to try to please all of such a huge
userbase, but Pao seems to have been able to unite some very unlikely factions
against her.

~~~
psychometry
You say there is no apparent cause, but you're not privy to the details and
have no right to be unless you were a reddit employee working closely with
her. It would be bad form to publicize the details of anyone's firing,
regardless of the position and company.

The only legitimately complaint in all of this is that there wasn't any notice
to people who depending on the fired person. That doesn't even begin to
explain the outrage, though.

~~~
fnordfnordfnord
>but you're not privy to the details

That's why I said there is no _apparent_ cause.

>not privy to the details and have no right to be

Strictly speaking that's correct. Here in the real world, Reddit might weigh
more carefully how their operational decisions have affected actual
operations, as opposed to continuing to operate as if they have total control
of every aspect of Reddit.

>It would be bad form to publicize the details of anyone's firing

Of course it is, but keeping silent won't stop the speculation. Something
tells me that decorum isn't the reason for Reddit's silence. I suspect they
are merely worried about exposing themselves to the possibility of a lawsuit.
In that light, it may have been better to come up with a more creative way to
move /u/chooter out of her role.

>The only legitimately complaint in all of this is that there wasn't any
notice to people who depending on the fired person.

That is one of the legitimate complaints about /u/chooter's firing. Like it or
not, it is perfectly legitimate for anyone, especially Reddit mods and users
to have and express an opinion about Reddit and their operations. That's kind
of what Reddit is, a place for people to express opinions; I am not sure how
that aspect escaped the notice of management. And, yeah, Reddit also dropped
the ball by not having a contingency plan for /u/chooter's departure and they
probably don't have contingency plans for other employees in critical roles.

>That doesn't even begin to explain the outrage, though.

That's because the firing of /u/chooter was just the catalyst that began the
release of a lot of pent-up discontent.

~~~
psychometry
What was the pent-up discontent about? Removing awful subreddits? I still
can't come up with any good reasons why people are so angry. Some moderators
should be mildly peeved, but that's about it.

~~~
fnordfnordfnord
>What was the pent-up discontent about?

Lack of moderation tools, unresponsive admins, accusations of shady conspiracy
stuff (payola, censorship, etc), there is other stuff. I don't care to list it
all but you should look into it if you want your arguments to be taken
seriously.

>Removing awful subreddits?

As has been related to you many times, that is a recent issue.

------
anthony_romeo
There were a few components associated with this recent upheaval.

\- Earlier that week, reddit modified the search function which (though I
don't know the details as I am not a mod and really don't care) apparently
affected or limited the moderators' abilities is some negative manner.

\- The banning of harassing subreddits, though none of the lurkers cared at
all and the majority of active users did not care, left a sour taste in many
users' mouths.

\- The firing of that employee apparently greatly affected the ability to
facilitate the most popular subreddit on the website, as well as a few others.

When the mods of IAMA closed shop for a while due to the third issue, the
powder keg exploded, leading others who disliked the treatment of mods and
those who irrationally hate the reddit CEO to make a hullabaloo for eight
hours.

Frankly, I deleted my reddit account due to this. Not for any dislike the CEO
or a desire to stand up for mods' rights, but rather because I genuinely do
not care about the drama anymore and would rather focus my attention on more
important things[1] and more interesting topics[2].

[1] Such as commenting on Hacker News.

[2] Such as discussions about Reddit.

:-)

------
bmm6o
It's crazy to me how poorly this whole recent "revolt" was handled. The only
thing of value to Reddit Inc is the community, so you think they would be more
proactive about everything, that they would be hiring more community managers
rather than firing key ones. Is this their Digg moment? Probably not, but how
many more fuckups like this can they make before the users leave for good?

I've cut Pao a lot of slack in the past, but this makes her look like she has
no idea what she's doing. No communication for days? Speaking to outside
reporters before speaking to her community? It makes no sense to me.

~~~
calcol
She did, in fact, attempt to reply to early discussions on Reddit but she was
downvoted into oblivion (e.g. -5500+ down votes) and she wasn't ever going to
be heard, no matter how relevant or important her discussion was. So she
probably thought it was smarter (and would get better exposure while the
community cools down a little bit) to communicate with Buzzfeed et. al.

~~~
bmm6o
Yeah, I've heard that, and that's crazy too. The community actually has a veto
on communications from the CEO? Absolutely nuts. They couldn't just hack the
backend to give her a billion upvotes?

~~~
Niten
Much of this controversy is driven by the community's loss of trust in the
site's administration. Do you think the tactic you suggest would be
constructive toward rebuilding that trust?

~~~
bmm6o
Faking upvotes, no. But that wouldn't be necessary if they had an actual
communication channel in place ahead of time. Which they would if they really
understood the value of the community and what it takes to manage it.

------
vonklaus
> We are sorry -Reddit Corporate

> Prove it -Reddit Community

There is no point in analyzing the apology, only the actions that occur over
the next month.

------
rdtsc
That was actually a decent apology not the typical corporate "We are sorry you
feel this way non-apology apology".

Yeah it came late. But better late than never.

~~~
forgottenpass
I dunno, she admits they broke promises and promise to do better _this time_.

Anyone who has been in that relationship knows it's entirely typical. They
_could_ change, but getting your hopes up is asking to get hurt again.

Also: they didn't pull the curtain back at all, so I still find it to be a
bland corporate statement.

------
iaw
This is the first thing I've seen from Ellen Pao that looks like a step in the
right direction. There area few challenges she faces at reddit that I don't
envy. It is an unfortunate consequence of her lawsuit that she gained enough
notoriety to be disliked by a portion of the male cohort of reddit. She is now
in the awkward position of both trying to address real problems with the site
that have gone unaddressed for a long time and mitigating the damage that her
personal brand is causing by being associated with the site.

Regardless of my personal opinions about her lawsuit it's really unfortunate
that the simple act of bringing the lawsuit has bled so much into her
interactions with the reddit community.

------
Jerry2
Why hasn’t the board of directors that governs Reddit taken action yet? They
need to hire a new CEO ASAP before the site becomes another Digg and people
leave.

------
jgrowl
I feel bad for Pao on a personal level, but I feel like she is too divisive to
be an effective leader of a site like reddit. All people deserve respect
though and should not have to put up with hateful personal attacks.

I think mainly this underscores the need for the internet to evolve. Sites
like reddit and twitter are too important to be controlled by a single for-
profit entity.

We need distributed systems that respect anonymity and privacy that prevent
censorship. We also need the ability for groups to form where content can be
curated.

I think there are a number of projects in development that have potential. It
will be interesting to see where things go.

------
oldmanjay
well, the harassment standard is worded in such a way that's it's purely
subjective, so I predict the continuation of inconsistent application of the
policy.

also, a decade+ of "terrorism" has left me feeling that fear-based policies
are a serious mistake.

on the other hand, I don't and likely never will use reddit, so this is all
popcorn-munching entertainment to me.

------
joeevans1000
They are trying to reframe the discussion around the idea that they failed in
communicating. What they failed in, actually, was keeping an astounding and
dedicated employee their users loved.

~~~
MBCook
No, I think they're dead on. They're allowed to fire people even if the
community likes them.

But they did fail to communicate. They failed to communicate it was going to
happen (no public transition). They failed to communicate it DID happen
(people found out via side-channels), they failed to communicate a plan to
keep things going smoothly (seems they didn't have one, which is amazing).

This applies to other incidents as well. They failed to clearly communicate
the rules when they banned a few subreddits a few months ago. There are TONS
of subs that are in clear violations of various rules but nothing happens to
them and no one has every clearly explained why. Just "We're doing something"
statements and guessing.

Quite a few of their recent makes were made SO MUCH WORSE by their lack of
clear and timely communication. They would still be issues, but at least
people could understand what was going on instead of rapid-rumor-mill-tea-
leaf-interpreting.

~~~
joeevans1000
> No, I think they're dead on. They're allowed to fire people even if the
> community likes them.

Well, this is true, because as owners can do whatever they want. But Reddit's
'product' is community, plain and simple. So firing a loved admin is
essentially taking away a bit of the reason for being on the site for many of
the users. I think at the heart of the discontent is the tension between a
grass roots community and the fact that there is ultimately a autocratic power
over it all. In other words, the firing is a reminder to the users that they
don't have control over their community.

This whole incident is just growing pain. Ultimately, they will form or join
another community where they don't need a paid liaison to the AMA person. That
community will have more self-governance. Additionally, that community may
self-fund itself, and the destruction of the the community in the interest of
monetization will be less easy. There is likely a lot of work that needs be
done to enable that type of community, both technically and socially.

~~~
uxcn
Social sites really aren't easy to monetize without pissing off your users.
MySpace imploded, Twitter still isn't profitable, Google backed off'ish from
Plus, etc... I think Facebook is one of the few that seemed to _successfully_
monetize a free social site.

I think the issue is that Pao (et al.) genuinely don't understand their
community. That's the major source of the friction. Consequently, they can't
figure out a realistic plan to build a healthy business around it. They seem
to manage to piss a large percentage of their community off with every minor
change they try to make. It's a bit sad because it's a huge community.

Possibly Aether ([http://getaether.net/](http://getaether.net/)) might be
something like what you have in mind.

------
GuiA
This is just a testament to how most MBAs are incapable of seeing past the
blinders that were put on their eyes in B school. Anyone who's been in Silicon
Valley long enough will have seen this in many other forms (I know I have),
although perhaps not as high profile as this one.

The success of Reddit is directly attributable to high profile subs
(/r/AskScience, /r/AskHistorians, /r/AMA, /r/ListenToThis, etc.) and less
visible but still well run subs that cater to more niche interests/topics
(/r/MakeupAddiction, /r/PersonalFinance, etc.). Those subreddits would not
exist without the thousands of man hours put in by moderators who are
volunteers (modulo a few exceptions, such as Victoria). Anyone who has
moderated an internet community knows how much sweat, effort, time, and pain
go into maintaining a high quality community, and how crucial it is to keep
your moderators happy and make them feel like their effort is valued.

The fact that the people running Reddit do not seem to realize that is a
perfectly valid reason for the user base to be angry. A lot of Silicon Valley
executives like to think of their company+product as some neat little money
making machine that sits in a vacuum and that they can tweak and modify as
they like. But the reality is that building a community platform like Reddit
is very different from running a sausage factory. You can run your sausage
factory in to the ground, and the sausages won't complain (the workers might,
but the US does a pretty good job at avoiding that through strict control on
labor unions). But when you start shitting on Reddit, the users will complain
and protest - after all, you might control the code and the servers, but the
community as a whole has contributed much more than you have to the end
product.

You can't separate "reddit" and "the community" like some commenters here are
doing. This dualism makes no sense - reddit and its community are the same
thing. You can't have the thoughtful, well run threads on /r/AskScience
without the dumb jokes on /r/funny.

Ellen Pao and friends do not seem to grasp those subtleties (this apology is
just damage control), and it lead to the complete disaster we are seeing right
now. This isn't rocket science - in fact the Reddit community is quite
predictable. Any Reddit user would have been able to tell you how the
community was going to react to these actions. The fact that Ellen Pao has
some shady connections (her husband not being in jail because he has enough
money is a good first example) is just more fuel on top of the fire. This was
extremely easy to predict, and the fact that the Reddit leadership seems to be
completely clueless about it is a very bad sign for things to come. The reddit
community didn't have a problem with kn0thing, yishan, and others because they
were first and foremost reddit users and know how to interact with the
community. It's not the case for the current people in charge.

The community has every right to be up in arms. And if you think that the
Reddit community is shit and don't spend time there, like some commenters here
state, then what makes you feel like your input has any sort of relevance?

This isn't a technology or management fiasco - it's a political debacle. At a
community interaction level, it's not very different from taking someone with
arbitrary credentials and putting them in charge of a country they're
completely unfamiliar with in the hope that they're going to make that country
a peaceful democracy. It just doesn't work - you need the leadership to come
from the community for it to have any lasting chance.

~~~
noahlt
Your opening potshot at MBAs detracts from the meat of your comment, which
contains at least two important insights: (1) the Reddit "product" and
community are inseparable; (2) to manage a community you must understand the
community, which almost always requires participation in the community.

------
calcol
Looking past the vitriol towards Ellen Pao, this seems to be primarily due to
a history of miscommunication between moderators, who feel they should have
more power and better ways to handle the communities they support, and the
admins of Reddit. While I think that there are definite issues on both sides
-- I'm not a moderator, especially not of a big subreddit, so I don't know how
disrespectful or how much the admins ignored the moderators requests, so my
perspective is of an outsider -- I really feel like this is all just a temper
tantrum that the moderators handled poorly, potentially purposefully. The
users by and large did not need to know that Victoria was fired, and it's a
shame that the moderators 1) let that information out, and 2) by letting it
out, effectively let it be used as a base for a parade against Ellen Pao. It
can't be argued that the moderators didn't/couldn't know this would happen
because this kind of shit happens on Reddit all the time, and the more vocal
parts of the community will cling to their dislike of Pao with this.

I think that the admins should have handled it better, for sure -- they could
have at least given the moderators that relied on Victoria's help the heads up
of, "hey, we are going to transition to a new community manager, for the time
being X, Y, and Z are going to occur," but the backlash from the community and
that the moderators are effectively using the community for their own gains
instead of trying to handle it internally is a pretty bad reflection on how
the community is structured as a whole. All I can think of is that this is
basically 4chan and social media combined.

------
noarchy
This post regarding the apology is fairly new, with a lot of points and
comments. Yet it has already sunk to page 2. I assume that reddit-related
posts are given a negative weighting of some kind on HN, of late?

------
paulpauper
A lot of Reddit users forget or don;t realize that Reddit is a business, not a
non-profit.

For all we know, it may not have been Ellen's fault...a lot of people jumping
the gun

------
lno
Serious question about my use case and opting for a substitute: I use reddit
to learn and interact with a community about my interests or things that I
want to learn. Reddit has been fantastic for this and about 75% of the time
the users of specific communities are great resources that I really can't find
anywhere else.

Recently, it's become increasingly apparent that drama around and within
reddit is ruining this - all I want to do is learn and engage - it's
impossible now to avoid it. Any alternative that keeps the quality high and
the format similar without all the ugly dramatics?

------
chr
Maybe it was laziness, but till now I've been expecting good things from
companies backed by YCombinator. Ekjp and kn0thing are eroding the brand value
of YC.

MY 2 cents, seen from far away.

------
glorien
Why do people moderate large subreddits? They don't get paid... what are they
actually getting out of it? Why continue to do it?

"fuck you, pay me"

~~~
Nadya
As someone who moderated a large forum (not a subreddit) of >100,000 users
(with ~15,000 active users at peak and rarely dipping below 3,000 users at
inactive times) a large part has to do with community.

The difference decent moderation can make in a large community can vastly
impact a community. There's a lot of networking that happens because of it. I
was an extremely well-liked moderator who would take over "dying" sections of
the forum. I was even given the nickname "The Lifegiver" because any board put
under my control would go from 10 posts/week to 100s of posts/day. I made a
lot of friends whom I still talk with to this day, nearly a decade later.
_That_ is what made being a moderator worth my time.

As to what jeletonskelly commented in response to you - no. There isn't always
someone willing to "fill the shoes". The boards I was left in charge of were
dead precisely _because_ nobody wanted to fill the shoes. Many members of
those communities were asked if they wanted to be "promoted" to moderate their
board: they always declined the position. Sometimes a board is dead and nobody
knows how to solve it or what it would take to revitalize it. Not everyone is
a leader.

Moderators who are bad with community management have their lives turned to
hell. Death threats from users who dislike your actions, dealing with
community drama (having to mediate between two users in an argument without
pissing either side off), dealing with 'staff' drama (mods who disagree with
how another mod handled something usually) is not worth "being in power" or
any "ego trip" you get from the position.

Moderators are not too far off from the founding administrator when it comes
to forums (or subreddits): They enjoy the community and want to help have a
part in the creation of the community.

Every good moderator I've dealt with has always put the community before
anything else.

It's when money _does_ get involved that moderation and administrative
decisions become questioned. The decisions are no longer _What is best for the
community?_ but _What is best for my account balance?_

------
sergiotapia
"Popcorn tastes good." \- Never forget that. Personally, I've moved on to
Snapzu. Peace out Reddit, it's been real. :)

[http://i.imgur.com/rburhK9.jpg](http://i.imgur.com/rburhK9.jpg)

------
dgcoffman
Reddit users are too stupid to effectively use reddit.

