Why did this apology come out today and not before Pao spoke to news outlets about this topic? Why wouldn't you try to talk to your upset users quickly and directly?
If you note her account's history, you might notice that every single one of her contributions has been mass-downvoted, including earlier responses on the matter. Downvoted content gets hidden. There's an ongoing voting war over the submission itself, with only 61% upvoting. That's way, way low for reddit.
Speculation: It's very possible that they decided to do press work first so that the message would not be muted by downvote brigading. That's a stupid thing to have to do, and has only served to upset even more people.
Brigading and associated behaviors are at the core of many of Reddit's more significant problems. They were among the rationales for the idiotic Search rewrite over the weekend (since then an option to revert has been provided).
I think Reddit's existing moderation system's outlived its usefulness.
I had the same experience with my account https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=pain, where we essentially force you to pay for ads, to (add) justify your voice time and space, if you are unpopular.∫
Does anyone else find it interesting, if not as a legal-rational process, that a community-builder and or er community-leader is unable to be heard and read because of that lack of logy?
Given the concerns over lack of communication, I wonder if that was the right move. I can see how hard this would be to manage on-site communications with everyone mass-downvoting anything from /u/kn0thing or /u/ekjp though, so I certainly don't have any better ideas.
At the very least, he could have posted beforehand to say "we'll get back to you about this on Monday."
Also, I don't understand the excuse about downvoting as a reason for not saying anything. If she says something worthwhile people will pick it up and link to it. So far, much of the reason they are getting downvoted is that they aren't saying anything meaningful. This thread was an exception.
I suspect that's the case. I just wanted to highlight that she's actually addressing these questions (which is an excellent step forward from a few days ago).
I would say it's a good start. Where she goes from here will be what matters. If she goes silent in the weeks and months ahead it will be clear this was just damage control. If she regularly engages the community, as she should, then she'll be on the right track.
See Zuck and his regular 'town hall meetings' on his public news feed. She does nothing like that. The only times we hear from her are when she has an announcement or is forced to respond to heavy criticism.
Given all the timing, a Monday site announcement, rather than someting buried over the weekend, is sensible.
It would have been preferable if Pao hadn't shot her mouth off to The New York Times over the weekend, with some spectacularly inept remarks cocerning her company and Reddit users.
But timing of this announcement isn't something I'd criticise her for.
Speculation: It's very possible that they decided to do press work first so that the message would not be muted by downvote brigading. That's a stupid thing to have to do, and has only served to upset even more people.