Pao apologizes
Pao makes an announcement as to how she plans on fixing her mistakes on Reddit.
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. We are grateful for all you do for reddit, and the buck stops with me …
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. I know we’ve drifted out of touch with the community as we’ve grown and added more people, and we want to connect more. I and the team are committed to talking more often with the community, starting now.
Thank you for listening. Please share feedback here. Our team is ready to respond to comments.
Claims Kleiner broke confidentiality
Pao says Kleiner is improperly publicizing confidential negotiations and asking her to pay unreasonable legal costs. The filing says Pao should not have to pay Kleiner’s “gargantuan and unreasonable charges” of nearly $1 million for expert witnesses and trial expenses. Pao claims that her request for $2.7 million to cover her costs to forgo an appeal, was part of a confidential discussion between attorneys for the two sides, and not intended to be publicized. Kleiner’s attorneys say that it was Pao who made the case so expensive:
If counsel for plaintiff wanted the demand to be confidential he should have said so.
Deletes subreddits
Pao enrages the users of Reddit by deleting /r/fatpeoplehate, a major subreddit with over one hundred and fifty thousand users, as well as four smaller subreddits. Pao says the act is to stop harassment:
We want as little involvement as possible in managing these interactions but will be involved when needed to protect privacy and free expression, and to prevent harassment…It is not easy to balance these values, especially as the Internet evolves. We are learning and hopefully improving as we move forward. We want to be open about our involvement: We will ban subreddits that allow their communities to use the subreddit as a platform to harass individuals when moderators don’t take action. We’re banning behavior, not ideas.
Users accuse Pao for censorship, even those that don’t like the subreddit.
Removes wage negotiations
In an attempt to reduce the possibility of a wage gap existing within Reddit, Interim CEO Pao removes the ability of employees to negotiate for their wages at reddit. Instead employees are offered a salary on a take it or leave it basis. This is due to findings that men are better at negotiating their salaries and as such usually end up with a slightly better salary than their female counterparts. Pao urges other companies to do the same, claiming that it is an important step in gender equality.
When somebody comes in we figure out what role they’re applying for, what band they’re in and we give them what we think is a fair salary in that band. It takes a lot of tension out of the process, we’ve had people apply to Reddit just because of that policy.