Before you guys dive too deep, I'd like to share my perspective if you'll listen.

I've been working on Carrot for over a year. It was inspired by my childhood on IRC and it's been through a lot of iterations (it was even called Radish at one point). We started rolling it out last month and it has seen significant adoption across reddit. However, we've seriously mishandled our PR on a number of issues—and we have no excuse for the mistakes we made.

We originally had a beta program where we kept a very intimate relationship with our users. When signing up for Carrot, users were subscribed to the subreddit and that's how we kept them posted. This included about 100 users from my university's subreddit.

It wasn't a problem until we started to grow bigger—and our relationships with users grew more distant. This way of keeping users posted on the app no longer made sense and it should've been opt-in in the first place. We removed this once we realized the implications.

In addition, we experimented with a feature that would help grow popular rooms, inspired by Robin. When you joined a room, it upvoted the room's post, as shown in this explainer. Unfortunately, this wasn't totally clear and it was another area that upset users.

We tried to fix both of these features as quickly as possible. They were removed 2 weeks ago and we subsequently open-sourced our extension to rectify the problem. Nevertheless, elfa82 was upset along with co-mods so they decided to make a few threads about our lack of integrity. These threads were posted in a number of Carrot rooms, driving some of our ardent users into the subreddit who didn't belong. They looked like a braindead vote brigade.

I tried to explain that we were trying to start on a new foot. Despite all our efforts, the frequency of the negativity increased. So I tried contracting elfa82 through the email he provided when signing up for Carrot. He didn't respond and he instead made another post, which included some really false information about scraping data (that would've legally put us in hot water). I panicked and I tried contacting him using the phone number when I googled his email. This was wrong—elfa82 had a right to post as much negative feedback as he wanted without me communicating with him. I should've just let it be.

In general, my biggest error is that I've approached our community with the same sense of intimacy that we had with our original 200 users—when in fact we are a much bigger platform at this point. This means much different expectations about how the app works and how the creators interface with users.

We'd like to own up to the issues that were brought up and take full blame. In some areas, we were deeply misguided and in others, we were simply tone-deaf.

We do have some basic commitments that I'd like to outline:

1. We will continuously open-source our software. To date, we'e open-sourced our browser extension and backend infrastructure—and more is to come.

2. We will guard user privacy to the fullest extent possible, meaning we will never release logs or IPs to anyone (including reddit). We'll delete logs after 90 days. (The reason the "IP tracking" exists is so that you can prevent trolls from creating throwaway after throwaway and spamming, stalking, and harassing our users. It was implemented as a direct response to female users being continually harassed and stalked. If you're a developer, and have a better way to solve this - we're all ears. I know IP bans are not entirely effective, but it solved that problem and a number of other less severe instances of trolling).

3. We will vet each feature by posting about it in our subreddit before launching it to users.

4. We will delete any account when requested.

5. We no longer delete comments if you have fair criticism of our service (but please don't hunt down every post I make and copy-paste the same paragraph).

6. We'll keep a running bounty on our extension if you find any malicious code.

At the end of the day, we still have thousands of users on Carrot so I feel obliged to continue serving them. I know some of you would like us to disappear forever—and perhaps that will happen now. Nonetheless, we're still going to try to make it work and restore your trust.

Nick