If the reddit community cannot learn to balance authenticity and compassion, it may be a great website but it will never be a truly great community.

Reddit gets it's userbase from the world, and the world is still not a great community overall. It's full of all kinds of people, some are the nicest that will give all they have to help a complete stranger, and others are sociopaths that enjoy ripping others off and being a bully.

As long as that is true, and Reddit is a website open to the public, it'll never be a community that's any better or worse than any other. Especially recently now that Reddit is becoming more popular among the majority, which attracts the lowest common denominator.

All you can really do is escape to non-default subreddits that have moderation. The defaults are the ones that that lowest common denominator will flock to.

But yes, Reddit is an open website that allows for people to talk under the guise of anonymity. That means they likely will lie, cheat, steal, and be assholes. Not all of them, but the "bad" people of society will certainly take advantage of it to be even worse than they'd usually be.

All of that said, I support this decision. It's wrong that Ellen got death threats and so forth, but I think we can all agree that she was not good for the job for many reasons, most of them having to do with her way of going about things and the kind of person she is overall (though I know it's unprofessional for you to say this officially and you won't), and that's why she's gone now.

Hope this really sorts things out with Reddit. Please Steve, don't leave Reddit and if you really have to, make sure your successor is someone you can really trust it with.

Lastly, I hope maybe you guys can bring back a lot of the old admins, including Victoria which is what causes the explosion here.

Thanks.