We apologize

316nuts · 53分前

How do you feel about various timelines and other goals that some subreddits have established as a way to keep you "true to your word"?

How will you measure success?

What is your time table?

KhabaLox · 45分前

Of the three "concrete" steps, only one, "Search" has any way to objectively measure success. Basically, you have allowed legacy search; I will assume what you've done addresses the concerns raised, but will leave it to more able/in-the-know mods to verify.

If the promises of "Tools" and "Communication are to be believed, you will need to lay out some measurable goals and targets, so that we can see that you are achieving them.

How will /u/krispykrackers "figure out how to communicate better"? Are you going to schedule conference calls, or hold scheduled AskAdmin threads? You should lay out a timeline for the next 3/6/12 months of what exact steps will be done to drive this process.
The work of two admins "with ... the moderators on what tools to build and then delivering them" is also vague. You need to commit to a date on when the first tool will be decided, and then on a timeline for delivering that tool. For example, by July 31, three "AskAdmins" threads will be published/held to discuss which tools are most desired by mods. By Aug. 15, Admins will announce the first 2 or 3 tools to be developed. By Aug 22, a project timeline will be posted as to when the tool will be delivered.

I feel like this is standard practice in business, especially with time-sensitive projects like software development. You just need to be transparent with mods with respect to information you should already be tracking.

crash__bandicoot · 56分前

Here's my thing: no one communicated. You all went to media outlets and did interviews and made this event into a press junket before this apology.

Even in this apology there are no explanations. What happened to Victoria (edit: in regards to no plan being in place or not communicating the release to the AMA mods)? Why are you trying to reform iAMA? These are things that should have been addressed right away - to the community.

In your interview with NPR, you said this is all because of miscommunication. Unfortunately, you aren't seeing that the remedy to miscommunication is to communicate with all of reddit - using /r/announcements. It was basically radio silence unless we followed you all from your user pages. And even then /u/kn0thing was acting like a complete joke.

In order to fix the major disparity in communication, you need to communicate with us. First, what are you going to do to fix things like this, not with the mods, but with the whole of Reddit? Second, when are you going to answer our unanswered questions?

/u/ekjp's response, posted here due to downvotes.

We made this post simultaneously on r/announcements.

It was hard to talk with people on the site, because my comments were being downvoted. I did comment here and on a private subreddit. I'm here now.

Unfortunately, the questions I posed are still unanswered. No questions to what went wrong, no answers to iAMA reform, no answers to what they're going to do to fix things with the whole of Reddit, and no timeframe on when the unanswered questions will be answered.

The apology is well received but we need to talk about the future. This is not an attack on you. I promise I'm remembering the human behind the keyboard, but the human needs to talk about what happened with more context.

/u/kn0thing's response, posted here due to downvotes.

Yeah, about my behavior....

I was stupid. I’d been talking with mods all day on subreddits I thought were restricted (only approved submitters can post, but anyone can view), not private (only approved people can view) and based on all the positive feedback I’d gotten, thought the tide was turning with the entire reddit community. And then I made glib comments that were on public subs in a bad attempt to be playful and have since edited the worst offender to acknowledge how stupid it was and remind myself to not be that dumb again. Ultimately, to 99% of our users, my comment history just showed a guy being stupid, and I’m sorry for that.

honestbleeps · 37分前

I know these are just words, and it may be hard for you to believe us. I don't have all the answers, and it will take time for us to deliver concrete results. I mean it when I say we screwed up, and we want to have a meaningful ongoing discussion.

No matter what is said here, people are going to be skeptical and not believe it and I'm glad that's being acknowledged.

I hope that there's a good avenue for meaningful ongoing discussion. It may need to be segmented into different groups.

I also think that reddit faces some extremely large challenges that most users don't really fully understand or empathize with. I understand that to a certain extent you have to keep things close to the vest (especially as it pertains to how you deal with spam, harassment, etc) - but there are greater community challenges that I feel reddit as a whole (staff-wise) has avoided facing that I would love to see.

I don't want to get too /r/TheoryOfReddit here, but I think there are some fundamental issues with the way reddit is structured that suggest to me it has outgrown its (conceptual, not technical) architecture. I would love to know if any of the reddit staff feels the same, or if they are hardline on their stance that "the system works"

"let the votes decide, always" has been the stance of many a reddit admin I've spoke to both in person and online. I think Reddit is too big for this to be true anymore, and you've validated that yourself by removing cancerous subreddits, etc. Sometimes terrible content needs to be removed, and as the proliferation of "easy to consume" content has exploded, more thoughtful content is generally buried under the weight of pictures and image macros ("memes") --- not because it's better content, but because of the simple principles of UX -- it's easier to remember to vote on something that took you 3 seconds to consume than it is an article that took you 15 minutes to read -- and the voter on pictures will vote on more things than the voter on interesting content. It doesn't affect monetization, of course, but I would still love to see Reddit solve this somehow - either categorizing content by media type (articles, pictures, etc) - or a different voting structure or... something...
Moderator "power" - several "mod squatters" created damn near every subreddit keyword imaginable when subs first became a thing. They sit idle doing nothing at all but being top mod on a bunch of huge subs. This means that at any time they could wake up and shut down a sub, remove all the other mods, etc. These people need to be removed in my opinion. If they're not actively moderating, they shouldn't be moderators.
More on "first come first served" in the moderator hierarchy -- you've seen twice now with /r/IAmA that sometimes reddit needs to step in and do something with a specific sub. When it's big and vital or has the potential to be big and vital due merely to its name (e.g. a generically named sub that new users looking for subs will obviously search for) - I feel it's in reddit's best interests to ensure that there are decent moderators in place (perhaps least via transparency like public mod logs) and allow takeovers when it's legitimately justified.

I realize that getting into that sort of hornet's nest is a delicate and terrifying process given the way the toxic portions of the reddit community can be when they react. I'm certain this is why reddit has avoided touching it. However, I believe that as Reddit has grown, it has outgrown the "voting always works" and "let subs be first come first served" systems that did once work well when it was smaller.

stumblepretty · 1時間前

The effort is appreciated, but, like you said, there's not much faith left in the admin team to provide support to the moderators after a lot of empty promises. There will need to be a drastic and tangible improvement to moderator support before anyone trusts this whatsoever.

cordis_melum · 31分前

Thank you for the public apology. I'm really happy that /u/Deimorz is going to be working with /u/weffey full time for the new mod tools.

I'm saddened by the fact that you went to the media prior to posting this public apology to the mods in /r/modnews (and while I know you were discussing things with us in /r/defaultmods and /r/modtalk, not everyone who happens to be a moderator has access to those subreddits, and it wasn't fair for people who did not meet the requirements for one or both subs to be left out of the loop like that).

I'm sorry that the blackout thing ended up being an anti-Pao circlejerk fest. I can confidentally say that for /r/history's moderation team, this was never our intention, and while a number of my fellow moderators would do it again, we're not happy about the fact that it became yet another tool against you for reasons unrelated to lack of administrator support.

Again, thank you for this long due public apology. Personally, I appreciate it.

atomnapier · 59分前

Popcorn tastes good.

mmmsausages · 1時間前

What a joke. You didn't even communicate to the community first, and instead went to a media outlet, what makes you think anyone wants to listen to you anymore.

K_Lobstah · 51分前

From a moderator perspective, these three steps are actually very encouraging and I personally appreciate them for what they are- acts of good faith.

We don't expect you to inform us of every internal decision made within the company and we don't expect you to give us everything we want we just want to know we've been heard and that someone gives the tiniest fraction of a crap.

So despite what will inevitably happen in this thread as people jump on the "not enough" bandwagon, would like to extend a personal thank-you for stepping up to the plate this time.

edit: autocorrect is my sworn nemesis

AxsDeny · 56分前

Is there a development roadmap of any sort for reddit as a software package? Being transparent about your goals will go a long way in getting buy-in from the mods that make this site usable on a day to day basis.

Sir_Tinklebottom · 59分前

Step down and acknowledge the fact that you have no idea what you are doing.

edit: as others have linked below me, here is the petition https://www.change.org/p/ellen-k-pao-step-down-as-ceo-of-reddit-inc

Meneth · 58分前

Thank you. I'm looking forward to seeing these promises be fulfilled.

Effective immediately, he will be shifting to work full-time on the issues the moderators have raised. In addition, many mods are familiar with u/weffey ’s work, as she previously asked for feedback on modmail and other features. She will use your past and future input to improve mod tools. Together they will be working as a team with you, the moderators, on what tools to build and then delivering them.

This especially does a lot to satisfy my issues with the admins. So long as this gets accomplished in a timely fashion I'm happy.

Starlightbreaker · 57分前

ctrl+f "transparency"

hmm, not anywhere in the text.

seamslegit · 36分前

"the vast majority of Reddit users are uninterested in what unfolded over the past 48 hours."

Do you still believe this?

steptank · 51分前

Even if reddit makes a full recovery, the tension between the users and the admins will always be there. 170k signatures on change.org to remove /u/ekjp means alot. Reddit wants removal of the higher ups, not just open comments saying its gonna change.

TommaClock · 1時間前

We apologize, but not for censorship, which recently culminated in firing an employee, but for things no one cared about.

unsuitable_sick_burn · 35分前

The Internet has got hella serious these past few days. Can we just go beck to posting cat pics? Thanks.

DjC4 · 37分前

Thank you for finally saying something. Along with many others, I'm disappointed at the lack of communication. But, thank you for starting a dialogue. I really hope it's sincere and meaningful.

Treypyro · 36分前

I really truly do hope you are being honest. There are so many people that love this website. But you have lost the trust of the mods and the users.

All I ask is do not monetize this site. Keep up reddit gold, and expand reddit merch. Lots of people want merch. Set up a link on the main page to the store. Hats, shirts, toys, etc. That would be a huge revenue stream and you could lessen up on ads. Everyone fucking hates ads, reddit content is community driven not business bought.

tilsitforthenommage · 31分前

I honestly don't care about accountability or what you do with staff but I care when shenanigans interfere with the subs I love. So for the love of god deliver on these promises cause if you guys fuck up again it's just going to rock the boat.

Sinistar_Lives · 31分前

I have a comment/suggestion/whatever which isn't specifically related to mod tools, but, the next time there is a widespread backlash to a corporate decision or policy across the userbase, your first step had better be 'engage the community in good faith about their concerns' not 'get on twitter/whatever news site and proclaim that most of the userbase doesn't really care about these concerns, which totally excuses admins going around deleting threads about the controversy and shadowbanning users at will'. You can't have a site powered 100% by user-submitted and user-generated content and expect to get away with this kind of shit. You have to listen to us, you have to care about what we think, and you have to take us seriously, even if in the silence of your contemplation you hold us all in contempt, AND EVEN IF we're secretly all misogynistic neckbeards who only hate you because you're an asian woman.

stopscopiesme · 27分前

What changes will be made in regards to how r/reddit.com modmailing works? It's a terrible system for those admins and for us, and many of our messages go unanswered. That modmail is the main line of communication between admins and users (including admins and mods) and it needs fixed ASAP.

The global rules are not enforced consistently and reports of violations are not actioned consistently. General questions (not reports) to r/reddit.com modmail go unanswered. Is this because the community management team does not have enough workers, or because their tools are so poor, or both? Whatever the case, how will you fix it and what is the timeline?

The global rules do not make it clear exactly what I should report, and how. So maybe I end up sending messages to r/reddit.com frivolously, and maybe that's why so many are unanswered. But I don't know, and I can't know, because no one is communicating with me.

I would most like to see more communication between the community managers and the users. (Namely krispykrackers, sporkicide, and ocrasorm, who have the most experience dealing with us).

Mentioning /u/krispykrackers since this might now be up her alley

The current way things are being done is barely bearable. I'm begging for an answer here.

splattypus · 23分前

Thank you. In my 5+ years and unfathomable amount of hours in that time on reddit, I can't recall a post ever so straightforward like this from the admins admitting fault or addressing specifics.

I'm still wary, because we've been promised things in the past that were never delivered, but I'm more optimistic since you mentioned specific items on the agenda and named Admins to address it.

I'm glad to hear that /u/krispykrackers is the Mod liaison now, a position so desperately overdue it's laughable. In all my experiences with her over the years, I hold her in the highest personal regard of anyone I've dealt with still currently on the Admin team. If she asked me for help moving, I'd be there in a heartbeat for her. That said, she has also been a participant in the problem of what I assume is a company policy of tight-lips on many matters that need feedback, guidance, or assistance. So as much as who is handling these issues, we still need to see and need to believe through experiences that the issues will be addressed.

I wish /u/weffey and /u/deimorz the best of luck too, I know they have their plates full with a list of suggestions, fixes and improves spanning years.

For the sake of these 3 admins who now find themselves tasked with a huge job, and for the sake of the community fed up and unlikely to tolerate another monumental failure, I encourage them to be proactive in communicating with the community. And I encourage you and the rest of the top brass to make as many resources as necessary available to them. The Moderator Advocate position is surely a full time job in and of itself, there's no room for slack if there are any other responsibilities to be addressed too. The 'community management' team is woefully understaffed as it is, with many messages and needs going unaddressed for hours and days, it would be unfair to Krispy and to all of the mods to be met with more of the same.

interestedincat · 18分前

Will you defend the mods/users to the press/blogs who frequently steal content from Reddit only to then mock the userbase?

astarkey12 · 17分前

One piece of feedback I'd like to add is that the site needs more community managers. Once cupcake left, the primary point of contact for most mods was gone, and this likely contributed to the breakdown in communication further worsening the rabbit hole of admin mod mail. /u/krispykrackers needs the support of community managers whose primary focus is handling issues we bring up, advising us when we need it, and ensuring our feedback is appropriately discussed.

If we had (let's say) 3 admins of /u/cupcake1713's caliber working in conjunction with krispy, the relationship would experience a drastic improvement. I understand this would be quite a serious investment in an area with comparably lower return (and that's more difficult to quantify), but the intrinsic value is incalculable. Essentially, the admin team needs more feet on the ground - there are a number of talented mods here who I'm sure would love to contribute in that way.

sandyxdaydream · 54分前

u/krispykrackers is trying out the new role of Moderator Advocate. She will be the contact for moderators with reddit. We need to figure out how to communicate better with them, and u/krispykrackers will work with you to figure out the best way to talk more often.

Really excited for this. Although Victoria leaving still sucks, from the few interactions I've had with /u/krispykrackers as a mod myself, she is also a very understanding and chill admin. I can't wait to see what she has in store for us.

elquesogrande · 29分前

Glad you put this up, but this all blew up last week. The reddit leadership team issued statements to press multiple times but never engaged with mods until now. It's a fine example of creating your own crisis and then failing at crisis management.

SIMPLE MESSAGE TO ADMINS

This is about engagement with the reddit community and mods. Understanding what is working well, where the mod volunteers could use support, where creative ideas are bubbling up, and where collaborating can help make reddit a better (and profitable) place.

Instead, management is taking a doing things TO reddit community members and mods approach instead of with reddit.

IT IS NOT ABOUT TOOLS

Seriously. These are nice-to-have things but reddit has grown without them. It's about the community and collaboration and engagement.

The Victoria Taylor fiasco you created should be a guiding light. Instead, you keep dancing around the key lesson. She engaged with mods, understood needs, and provided a gateway into reddit management that allowed mods and communities to advance.

Step one in an apology should be an understanding as to why Victoria's work mattered and how you might be able to create better support systems / engagement with mods and the community to duplicate this behavior. Instead, we're getting vague hand-waving about /u/krispykrackers figuring things out...somehow.

It's already figured out. Engage, listen, collaborate, and set limits where needed.

WE CAN HELP REDDIT BECOME PROFITABLE

At what point did your fears of becoming Digg II overrule common sense that reddit needs to make money? That the community as a whole will not understand this concept?

You and your investors need to make money to keep this thing rolling.

Go ahead and sign up with a search engine company to monetize search tools. Get warrants and boost the value of a good, new search engine. Tie it into key advertising that matches with communities.

Virtually wall off NSFW areas for advertising so that you can get some of the revenues that way.

Get the Board together and make someone a full-time CEO so that you can set your own course. This interim nervousness isn't helping. Make a call. Any call.

Engage with the community to understand what might be more acceptable ways for reddit itself to become profitable. Ideas and thoughts seem to be locked in the reddit leadership pantheon.

Maybe show a little more humbleness if that's possible. /u/kn0thing comments on eating popcorn while reddit is burning sure is cute from a Silicon Valley On High perspective. Same with the CEO talking to press dismissing the very people that help to make reddit work. That's not leadership, though - it's the type of negative audacity that turns even us supportive redditors off.

THIS CANNOT BE FIXED - IT CAN EVOLVE

Time to put on your big-reddit pants and adjust your leadership style or this empire is going to crumble.

Collaboration is key. Time to really reach out and work together. Or throw tools and communication quips into a burning building and issue press releases while Rome burns.

Honestly, there is a strong core of mods and redditors here ready and willing to help out. To help lead. It's up to you to honestly reach out for assistance and to open those communication channels.

Contexual · 1時間前

Interesting, I still would've preferred to see this as a blog post.

BlackDeltaLight · 1時間前

Just step down, please.

Zuunster · 41分前

she previously asked for feedback on modmail

Mod communication is currently a complete joke, and I hope that modmail, and any other tools to help mods collaborate fluidly, will be high priority.

based_nerd · 39分前

Thank you, I was really hoping that you would make a post like this. Without communication we are left to make assumptions, and sometimes with a little provocation from an admin or two, the assumptions are almost always negative. Even a "We know something is up and we're trying to figure it out, hold please" goes a lot further than radio silence.

Toptomcat · 32分前

We screwed up. 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.

Today, we acknowledge this long history of mistakes.

Could you please be more specific about exactly which actions you've made over the years you now regard as mistakes, why you think they were mistakes, and why you think the steps you've mentioned are the best way to address them?

Hakumen · 28分前

Thanks for your post, I appreciate the message. I'm a mod of some really small videogame subreddits. I'm excited for better moderation/modmail tools and more efficient communication with admins should I need anything. This past weekend's events didn't really affect my subs and our ability to discuss the subs' contents. Looking forward to better communications between mods and admins along with the promised functionalities.

IamGrimReefer · 24分前

well we gotta start somewhere. all we can do is wait and see.

RampagingKoala · 12分前

Hi Ellen, I would like to call out your remarks where you said ("The majority of Reddit users are uninterested in Victoria's dismissal and the subreddits going private")[http://www.thesocialmemo.org/2015/07/reddit-ceo-ellen-pao-vast-majority-of.html].

As a mod on a smaller, but popular sub, that really stung. It reeked of condescension, and to be honest, that statement makes it difficult to trust that you're actually serious about making changes. A lot of people have made statements to the effect of "you're right, but you pissed off the content creators and mods, and that's more important", and I agree with that wholeheartedly. If you think so little of the people who mod and create content for reddit, why should we care that you are apologizing now, and why should we believe that you are serious? Your statements seem in bad taste at best, and inflammatory at worst.

I want to believe that you are serious about making these changes, but I would really like some insight on your comments that you made there, and what the reasoning was behind them.

Too_Much_Overtime · 6分前

Holy crap, this is beautiful. Ellen, this is perfect- but I don't think "better late than never" applies here. Honestly, if you would have come out saying this a long time ago, it would have saved a lot of drama.

Regardless, thank you.

Rubin0 · 5分前

Actions speak a lot louder than words.

At this point in time, only the admins and the heads of the largest the subs are privy to the actual and specific improvements being made on moderator tools and search.

Are there any plans to have a public project plan of what specific features are being worked on, including their status and their estimated completion dates?

There is an opportunity here to be transparent to the whole community as well as get feedback/advice/suggestions/code-snippets/free-third-party-software from a nearly endless supply of software development talent already in the community. The creators and users of /r/toolbox have been begging for years for reddit to wholesale copy and paste their code. There is work that we can provide to speed the process along.

Please consider my proposal. As you said above, your announcement is "just words". Please show us something that goes beyond this post that doesn't require waiting several months for and takes out a lot of the guesswork.

Thank you for your time.

dksprocket · 47分前

You should comment on what happened with Victoria. Not necessarily in full detail, but a tl;dr of what it was about. If it was disagreements over how AMAs should be done then be honest about that. If it was unrelated to AMAs then at least state that (and keep the details confidential).

When you keep silent the only logical conclusion is that something was swept under the rug.

yurisses · 11分前

If you're truly sorry for what you've done, do an AMA so you can answer the hard questions. Like what you have to say about shadowbanning people who so far as mention your lawsuit.

PhantomandaRose · 44分前

u/ekjp can you publicly and clearly state that reddit has no intentions of manipulating or monetizing AMAs? Can you publicly and openly pledge that reddit admins will not interfere in the open and free discourse that AMAs provide the reddit userbase?

You claimed that Victoria was not fired for opposing attempts to monetize AMAs, but as far as I know, you have not commented on the suspicions of many redditors that you are attempting to manipulate and monetize AMAs. This would help ease my concerns about this whole fiasco, as it seems you have been dodging a lot of real concerns by picking and choosing which things to address.

FayeNovak · 1時間前

The feigned humility is cute in a schadenfreude sort of way.

Rechamber · 54分前

Words are meaningless at this stage. I think the only way to even begin to amass any semblance of trust now is through actions - get your fixes and improvements rolled out asap. The apology is recognised but neither appreciated nor accepted at this stage, I'm sorry to say, unless things actually happen.

TehAlpacalypse · 49分前

Thanks for making the post. This is probably going to get downvoted to infinity just because of who made it, but I'm looking forward to concrete steps in the right direction.

Cthulhumanism · 54分前

That's great for people heavily invested in being moderators, I guess, but you don't seem to have addressed the various concerns of the users who provide the content that will be moderated.

There's no point in being the best moderated ashheap if the content has migrated to your competitors.

zkid10 · 55分前

I've been pretty impartial when it came to the recent issues, but I do feel that the people who are most upset, and have every right to be upset, will not be happy until you are finished delivering on these promises. I hope you have the best of luck in regaining even a fraction of the trust the Reddit community had placed on you as a team. I have been a Redditor for 2 years, and would hate to see this place bite the dust.

LocutusOfBorges · 50分前

Glad to hear that new mod tools are in the works and being taken seriously. Frankly, that's all I'm concerned with- the IAmA situation's unfortunate, but it doesn't affect any of the subreddits I moderate in the slightest.

A passing glance at the /r/announcements thread's 340 comments in six minutes suggests that that place is going to be a nightmare. The amount of hysteria the reddit admin team's having to deal with in this affair is ridiculous- I don't envy you people.

rocketpastsix · 58分前

Too little, too late.

DickSlampunch · 59分前

IMPEACH

Wanghealer · 1時間前

Thank you for apologizing, but you should've come here first rather than other news websites.

llehsadam · 38分前

I like /u/krispykrackers, so apology accepted.

We all want to make reddit be the best it can be and the userbase can only do that if you talk to us more! I think I can say from all moderators, we are counting on you keeping your word! :)

Thanks, /u/ekjp!

EndowedTurtle · 57分前

The apology won't mean anything because you won't deliver on your promises. Either do what you say you're going to do, or quit and find someone else who will deliver.

PavementOnWheels · 49分前

It took a petition for your resignation to reach 150,000 signatures before you felt it necessary to apologize? It's a little bit late for damage control, don't you think?

Killer39800 · 1時間前

LEAVE PLEASE

I_DRINK_BABYOIL · 52分前

What is Reddit going to do about the censorship? I would say that, that is the basis of about 90% of the recent criticisms.

jayjaywalker3 · 38分前

I was never really on this bandwagon but I appreciate the changes and the explanation. Thank you.

pouzou · 44分前

If you are serious about communicating with us, how about you start by answering our questions? Why was Victoria let go, especially before a new clearly thought out method of handling AMAs was put into place? Why was /u/Kickme444 let go?