https://www.reddit.com/r/modnews/comments/3cbnuu/we_apologize/
created by ekjp on 06/07/2015 at 17:34 UTC
0 upvotes, 102 top-level comments (showing 25)
We screwed up. Not just on July 2, but also over the past several years. We haven’t communicated well, and we have surprised you 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 have often failed to provide concrete results. 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. We are grateful for all you do for reddit, and the buck stops with me. We are taking three concrete steps:
1: https://www.reddit.com/wiki/search#wiki_enabling_legacy_search
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.
Thank you for listening. Please share feedback here. Our team is ready to respond to comments.
Comment by KhabaLox at 06/07/2015 at 17:51 UTC
688 upvotes, 7 direct replies
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.
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.
Comment by 316nuts at 06/07/2015 at 17:43 UTC
315 upvotes, 3 direct replies
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?
Comment by [deleted] at 06/07/2015 at 17:41 UTC*
1577 upvotes, 10 direct replies
what if trees had boobs. what then.
Comment by Z0bie at 06/07/2015 at 17:59 UTC
21 upvotes, 1 direct replies
Can you give some more details on these tools and search changes, other than that you're planning on giving us them at some point?
This is all awfully vague...
Comment by wolfflame21 at 06/07/2015 at 19:57 UTC
73 upvotes, 1 direct replies
Just for the love of god. Do not commercialize AMA's.
Comment by alystair at 07/07/2015 at 02:02 UTC
19 upvotes, 2 direct replies
Just curious if /u/kn0thing will cover this whole fiasco in an upcoming episode of Upvoted, seems like a good medium to get story straight... although not so hot to publicize it to even more people.
Comment by [deleted] at 06/07/2015 at 18:18 UTC
17 upvotes, 1 direct replies
Will you defend the mods/users to the press/blogs who frequently steal content from Reddit only to then mock the userbase?
Comment by AxsDeny at 06/07/2015 at 17:40 UTC
51 upvotes, 3 direct replies
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.
Comment by [deleted] at 06/07/2015 at 18:20 UTC
36 upvotes, 1 direct replies
[deleted]
Comment by mcawesomebee at 06/07/2015 at 20:46 UTC
26 upvotes, 0 direct replies
I'm late to the party, but my job is a lot of volunteer management, and I think the real issue wasn't that you didn't deliver materials, but that you ignored the needs and wishes of your volunteers.
You need to review the way you handle volunteer, and community management, and not just in one small post. You might want to invest on some training for your management team about volunteer relations. There seems to be a serious disconnect with the management and the actual community - one that you can easily remedy by spending about 12 hours just fucking around on reddit.
Comment by AaronFriel at 06/07/2015 at 19:22 UTC*
81 upvotes, 2 direct replies
Hi Ellen, Alexis (/u/ekjp, /u/kn0thing)
I'm writing to make a simple plea for the future transparency of Reddit. The opacity and the impact that has on users and moderators has made everyone see red, and not the good orangered sort. The problem, as I see it, is that every time Reddit *the Company* decides to do something, the community only finds out after it's been implemented and decided upon. Whether this is with changing policy regarding AMAs and /r/IAmA, or banning a subreddit for being harassing, deciding that brigading is not okay, etc. In each of these cases, policy came on the heel of action, that is, someone was fired, people and subreddits have beenbanned, and users have seen themselves shadowbanned.
That doesn't strike me as excellent stewardship for a community of millions of people. Reddit *the Community* finds out after Reddit *the Company* decides, and in many cases, has already implemented the change. Shadowbanning wasn't a thing when I first started using Reddit. Heck, brigading also wasn't even a thing people talked or were concerned about. But now we have people being banned and subreddits being threatened with removal themselves if they don't comply.
A great step forward for regaining the trust of the users, and not just the moderators, would be to make these policies clearer, and announce changes in advance of their implementation. Please, stop surprising Reddit *the Community* with all these changes. Announcing changes in /r/DefaultMods or /r/ModTalk doesn't count, either. Those are private, secluded communities.
And let's talk about shadowbans. That's some Newspeak level, peculiarly manipulative censorship. *From the outside*, and because of their nature, it seems like they're being abused. Maybe they aren't, maybe everyone on Reddit is lying about the circumstances of their shadowbanning. That's fine: but other users have no way to check. We can either take your word for it, or we can take the word of dozens or hundreds of accounts who appear to be shadowbanned for criticizing Reddit, or otherwise breaking obscure rules.
Please end shadowbanning. It's unverifiable from the user's perspective. We can't tell if people are being silenced for criticizing Reddit, or those users are trying to deceive us to think that it's so. If it looks like Reddit *the Company* is actively censoring and silencing people, and the way it's done is so that it's indistinguishable from a user deleting their account, then naturally people are going to get a bit on edge, a bit suspicious. End that suspicion by ending the practice. Give the moderators better tools to deal with users who are disruptive, or make bans obvious. Don't *shadow* ban people, as Shia says, **just do it** it and make it obvious. Make it so banned users see a giant "banned" banner, and make their profile show that they have been.
All this secrecy, all this opacity from the users just makes everyone suspicious of everything you do. How could you be anything but the villains now? It seems like all of this started in the past year or two, with a massive increase in the number of shadowbans, and with actual Reddit communities being banned (but announced after the fact), it's hard for us to trust the company.
P.S.: This was sent as a press release to Buzzfeed being before posted on Reddit? Consider the effect that has on the community. Buzzfeed journalists find things out before we do.
Comment by elquesogrande at 06/07/2015 at 18:07 UTC
118 upvotes, 4 direct replies
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Comment by stumblepretty at 06/07/2015 at 17:36 UTC*
155 upvotes, 1 direct replies
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.
Comment by atomnapier at 06/07/2015 at 17:37 UTC
335 upvotes, 4 direct replies
Popcorn tastes good.
Comment by stopscopiesme at 06/07/2015 at 18:09 UTC*
29 upvotes, 1 direct replies
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.
(And I am one of many whose messages are not being answered.)
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.
Comment by RampagingKoala at 06/07/2015 at 18:24 UTC*
141 upvotes, 5 direct replies
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"[1].
1: http://www.thesocialmemo.org/2015/07/reddit-ceo-ellen-pao-vast-majority-of.html%5D
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.
Comment by [deleted] at 06/07/2015 at 19:35 UTC
10 upvotes, 1 direct replies
[deleted]
Comment by elbruce at 07/07/2015 at 09:37 UTC*
7 upvotes, 0 direct replies
Look, I understand that no company in the world is going to publicly speak about an employee firing. That's a no-go for a million very good reasons. Unlike many here, I would never ask about that.
And then you did it right before 4th-of-July weekend, while the Internet had plenty of time to freak out over it but while presumably most of you were out of the office. What even the fuck? Do you even Internet, bro? *Timing.*
I say "*were* at that moment" because the way you handled things may have killed the AMA pop-culture movement for good, or at least Reddit's dominance of it. Perhaps Twitter owns it now. How do you feel about that? Or perhaps AMA's are "over" and the internet will move on to something else, and you dropped the ball. That was your ball. That you owned and held, and now it fell down the drain into the sewer. No more ball. It was a great ball, and we all enjoyed it and it was yours, and it was the biggest thing on the Internet, and now it may very well be gone.
More importantly, if something with the similar global cachet of AMA's emerges from Reddit in the future, how do you intend to follow up on it? Do you have a plan for that sort of thing? You should.
I would agree that it's untenable to have such an asset revolve around a single employee like AMA's were with Victoria. No corporation ~~would~~ should allow that. You should have had a whole team assigned to that function, well before the POTUS decided to participate in one. *That's* where you made the mistake. That's what you should be responsive to, and have a plan in place to look out for and respond to going forward. It's almost as if you had no awareness of the importance of AMA's and had some minor employee in the back handling them because no one else was doing it, instead of focusing on supporting a major site feature. And then abruptly got rid of that employee without having any idea of how important their function was.
Tools, communication and resuming the famously laughable search function (I use Google for my Reddit searches) are all well and good, but:
I'm more concerned about structural foresight. Not even foresight, it's all *hindsight* at this point. If something emerges out of Reddit that becomes a huge deal, are you going to look out for that, put team support on it so that it's not hanging by a single-employee thread, and.. I'm not sure what I'm asking here. Just do it.
One of the great things about Reddit is that it's a *platform.* The basic functionality is something that the users can shape into something you didn't expect. As a company, you need to be responsive into what we build in your sandbox, and make the most of those assets that we develop for you. The next "thing" to become popular in Reddit, maybe more popular *than* Reddit, could appear any moment. You don't want to "Victoria" it again when that happens, do you? When the President of the United States is doing a Q/A on your site, you should be having board-level meetings on why that is happening and what you can do as a company to support that feature going forward. Not just shuffling that function to a single employee who it turns out you viewed as disposable anyway.
Structurally support what becomes groundbreakingly good about Reddit, in a responsive and forward-looking fashion.
Hope you're listening. Best of luck. I'm still rooting for you to get it together.
Comment by mmmsausages at 06/07/2015 at 17:37 UTC
412 upvotes, 4 direct replies
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.
Comment by TheGreenJedi at 06/07/2015 at 21:33 UTC
20 upvotes, 0 direct replies
I'm completely unimportant but here's my 2 cents as a useless mod:
I think what immediately annoys me is that this is **nearly** identical to the /r/announcement apology. It doesn't and hasn't felt like you understand the problems mods encounter and work against.
I expected better apology in here, but I'm happy the tools comment was clarified to more detail. I hoped that level of improvement in granularity would be in the majority of the apology not just in the tools.
I do like the feedback being provided as I read some of the comments in here. It does give me hope.
There is an issue not being mentioned, but I'm somewhat glad that the recent big 3 are front and center.
I was looking for more regarding transparency and censorship. Something along the lines of "I apologize for how poorly communicated criteria for removal of subreddits has been". Honestly I'd suggest something equivalent to probation being declared or even parole. As a useless mod the idea that I might sink so much time into a community then have someone one day end my fun without any warning is terrifying. Currently there are no warning shots, there is no forgiveness. I hope in the future such events are explained in a more transparent fashion.
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As a normal user: It's down-heartening that you don't understand that Victoria made this real, I knew with 95% certainty that the actor was there giving the answers themselves and it wasn't just some PR rep typing it after taking a picture. It terrifies me how unconcerned and how slow to respond things often are. Granted it was a holiday weekend.
It's annoying to see subs go dark with what seems to be a snap of the fingers and no explanation 24hrs.
Also shadowbans being used as weapons against real people, some prominent users, it seems like there has been a policy shift towards using them more frequently. Might be nice to see some stats about the communities health, their usage monthly, general volume of bans, things like that. Seems like a permanent shadowban deserves basic feedback, and for a real world analogy aliens or the FBI taking a user to prison would be at least make the news the next day and would come with a presidential address.
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Anyways that's my 2cents from both perspectives.
In summary, It doesn't feel like you are one of us, feels like the Queen sits high from her castle and is annoyed when the Lords of her Kingdom complain about their taxes and invading barbarians.
Comment by honestbleeps at 06/07/2015 at 17:59 UTC
59 upvotes, 4 direct replies
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"
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.
Comment by broken42 at 07/07/2015 at 11:59 UTC
6 upvotes, 0 direct replies
I'd hoped you would say something about the absolute lack of official communication outside of having to dig through admin comments. It really says something about how someone sees a situation when they go on a press junket tour before actually addressing a situation in front of the community that it affects. At no point should you be giving interviews and trying to say that you're sorry and that you messed up through other means of communication before having a dialog with the community. That's why your petition currently stands at 200k+, because the absolute mismanagement time and time again whenever something happens.
Comment by AUNC_Aussie at 07/07/2015 at 08:27 UTC
15 upvotes, 2 direct replies
How has it been 14 hours with no-one dubbing this a "paopology"?
1. a regretful acknowledgement of an offence or failure, after a significant delay and multiple attempts to ignore or dodge responsibility, once all other options have been excised and your career is on the line.
"If I don't offer you this paopology I'll be unemployed and unemployable" *synonyms: expression of regret in being forced to acknowledge failure, one's regrets in having to acknowledge ones' own incompetence*
Comment by [deleted] at 06/07/2015 at 17:52 UTC*
28 upvotes, 1 direct replies
[deleted]
Comment by Jinno at 06/07/2015 at 19:31 UTC
5 upvotes, 1 direct replies
/u/deimorz, /u/weffey - As part of the expansion of moderator tools, and as a means to help curtail the brigading/harassment issues - can we get official support for the np.reddit.com subdomain?
As it is now, there is unofficial support via css to hide arrows and prevent user activity. It would be much more preferable to have the server actually return the page in question with no voting elements and no actionable links.