Whatever you think of Ellen, she's been ceo since Nov 14. How exactly does that makes her personally responsible for ongoing failures from multiple years beforehand? Did she borrow a DeLorean and order the team around during Yishan's tenure?
And to be fair to her she does take responsibility:
> and the buck stops with me.
If one of my employees wrote something like this I would never have accepted it.
Actually that's the typical corporate apology. The whole team gets the blame when you're playing the blame game! However CEOs and executives like pushing shit downward.
Employee vs CEO is a big difference in status and the type of apology to write.
Proper Apologies have Three Parts
1. What I did was wrong. 2. I feel badly that I hurt you. 3. How can I make this better.
(yeah it's from a sign on the wall at Jimmy John's)
I guess they had a look to the key performance numbers at Reddit after the blackouts, and finally understand that Reddit with new regime control kills popularity, sub-reddits going black can cause a pretty visible dip in the visitor stats. I guess this happens when you move from community driven to profit driven with a site like Reddit.
"We screwed up." "We haven’t communicated well..." "we acknowledge this long history of mistakes..."
This type of language shows a lack of ownership and accountability of the author. It's a huge red flag. If one of my employees wrote something like this I would never have accepted it.
A good apology would have started with something like, "I am sorry." Everything that happens at a company is ultimately the CEO's responsibility. The language used in ekjp's apology does little to reassure me that she actually feels like she owns the failures.