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; they were 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."
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