Reddit CEO Ellen Pao admits 'we screwed up' as row intensifies

Calls for Reddit's interim CEO Ellen Pao to step down have intensified after she admitted to a "long history of mistakes" during her eight months in charge of the site.

Reddit, a social networking and news platform, has a proud history of user involvement and allows dedicated individuals (known as redditors) to moderate sections of the site, determining the rules, responding to users' concerns and moderating content.

Pao has been under pressure since the company sacked Victoria Taylor, a popular employee who oversaw the site's Ask Me Anything (AMA) question-and-answer sessions that have allowed Reddit users to communicate directly with, among others, Barack Obama, Bill Murray, Tim Berners Lee, Julian Assange, Sir David Attenborough and Bill Gates.

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Over the weekend, several redditors shut down major sections of the site, or subreddits, in protest at the sudden and unexplained dismissal. More than 300 subreddits were closed in solidarity with Taylor, including the science, history and cinema sections.

Almost 200,000 Reddit users have also signed a petition calling for Pao to step down warning that she "will run Reddit into the ground."

In response to the protests, Pao issued a statement apologising for her part in the furore, admitting, "We screwed up...We haven't communicated well", adding that the "community have lost trust in me and us".

Pao continued: "We have apologised 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."

Yishan Wong, the former Reddit CEO who hired Pao, came to his successor's defence saying: "She's been in the job for a few months and is cleaning up the mess I made."

"The way redditors have been treating Ellen is eerily similar to how Republicans blamed Obama in his first years of the presidency for the problems he was working on fixing that were caused by the Bush administration," Wong added.