NEW YORK — After widespread user outrage over an abrupt employee dismissal at Reddit last week, Ellen Pao, chief executive of the online message board, apologized to the site’s members for what she characterized as a history of broken promises and poor communication.
Reddit’s management made errors, “not just on July 2, but also over the past several years,” Pao said in a post to one of the site’s forums Monday. “The mods” — moderators — “and the community have lost trust in me and in us, the administrators of Reddit.”
Large sections of the site were temporarily taken offline by users last week. The action was a protest by users after they discovered Thursday that Victoria Taylor, a well-liked and publicly visible Reddit employee, was dismissed with no warning to the community at large.
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Reddit, a 10-year-old company in San Francisco, is composed of topic-based forums, known as subreddits, where discussions take place on subjects like news and technology. Subreddits also host impromptu question-and-answer sessions with public figures like Bill Gates and President Obama.
The company has 70 to 80 employees and relies largely on its thousands of dedicated power users to govern the site. Reddit has grown over the past few years, regularly having more than 160 million visitors every month.
After Taylor’s departure from Reddit, hundreds of messages supporting her appeared.
“The admins didn’t realize how much we rely on Victoria,” wrote one user, who goes by the user name Karmanaut. “We all had the rug ripped out from under us and feel betrayed.”
In an interview last week, Pao and Alexis Ohanian, cofounder and executive chairman of Reddit, did not give a reason for Taylor’s dismissal. But the two apologized profusely for the way the company had handled what it called “a transition.”
That did not placate many Reddit power users and so-called moderators of the site, who have repeatedly stated that Reddit management has shown poor communication for years. Pao, in particular, has been a target for personal attacks, many of them racist and misogynistic in nature. As of Monday, an online petition asking for Pao to step down had gained more than 190,000 signatures.
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When asked about her most vitriolic detractors, Pao said that those people represented a vocal minority of the site’s members and that she appreciated most users, even if they sometimes disagreed on policies.
In the days after Taylor’s departure, Reddit users complained that the dismissal was the last straw in a long line of frustrations that community members had with the company’s leadership.
“Management appears to be focused on Reddit’s image, and not devoting any resources to actually running the site,” one prominent moderator, who asked to go by his Reddit handle Beernerd, said in an e-mail. “It’s as if they’re trying to decide what color to paint the walls while completely overlooking a crack in the foundation.”
Pao wrote that better moderator software tools for running the site were coming soon and pledged to communicate better with members via a new liaison, who goes by the handle “KrispyKrackers.” She also promised to more frequently respond directly to the community herself.
“I know these are just words, and it may be hard for you to believe us,” Pao wrote Monday. “I and the team are committed to talking more often with the community, starting now.”
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Pao joined Reddit in 2013 and became interim CEO in 2014 after her predecessor, Yishan Wong, resigned. Pao, a former junior partner at Kleiner Perkins Caulfield & Byers, sued the venture capital firm in 2012, alleging sex discrimination. She lost the high-profile case in March.