Reddit CEO sorry for ‘letting down’ users after firing of popular employee sparks revolt

The chief executive of the social media site Reddit, Ellen Pao, has apologised for “letting down” users after the company fired a well-liked employee.

Until Thursday, Victoria Taylor managed the site’s popular Ask Me Anything subreddit. Her dismissal as director of talent sparked a “Reddit revolt”, in which about 300 subreddits, or discussion areas, on topics including gaming, science, history, and cinema were shut down by their moderators.

While Reddit would not comment on the specifics of Taylor’s dismissal, the company said it was working on providing its moderators with a better infrastructure and support network.

In a comment posted on Reddit in response to a user looking for alternative sites, Pao said: “The bigger problem is that we haven’t helped our moderators with better support after many years of promising to do so.

“We do value moderators; they allow Reddit to function and they allow each subreddit to be unique and to appeal to different communities. This year, we have started building better tools for moderators and for admins to help keep subreddits and Reddit awesome, but our infrastructure is monolithic, and it is going to take some time.

“We hired someone to product manage it, and we moved an engineer to help work on it. We hired five more people for our community team in total to work with both the community and moderators.