Reddit CEO Ellen Pao apologizes for ‘lack of communication’ – update

Reddit director Ellen Pao has apologized for issues such as “lack of communication” by the organization. She also apologizes for “overtaking moderators and the community with changes to the site” and “not keeping promises.”

Ellen Pao apologizes on behalf of the entire organization through an announcement. She previously tried to engage with the community on Reddit, but her posts got so many downvotes there that no one got to see them. She apologized for Reddit’s policies and lack of communication in recent years, but declined to comment on the resignation of AMA coordinator Victoria Taylor.

In addition to an apology, she makes several promises. For example, Reddit will now speed up the development of the long-awaited mod tools and will also involve the moderators in this process. In addition, Reddit appoints an administrator to become the regular contact person for the moderators.

Finally, the site comes with an option to revert the recently modified subreddit search function to the old version. Users were already dissatisfied with the old search function, but seem to be even more dissatisfied with the latest changes.

The vast majority of the 200 subreddits that were set to private in protest of Reddit’s administrators’ attitudes and policies are now public again. Also /r/IAmA is available again. A new coordinator from Reddit to facilitate the AMAs is not forthcoming, but instead the administrators are working on developing a new protocol to handle AMAs. The company itself would play a smaller role in this.

Update, 11:30: While the resignation of Victoria Taylor sparked the protests on Reddit, the root of the protests is more due to the dissatisfaction many Reddit moderators have with administrators’ communications and policies. The text has been adapted accordingly.