Reddit has had something of a contentious relationship with many of its moderators as of late, but now, the company is trying to make amends. A Reddit admin (employee) identifying themselves as the company’s VP of community reached out to moderators through a new post on Wednesday, inviting them to participate in things like weekly feedback sessions, an accessibility feedback group, and in-person moderator road shows.

Reddit and many moderators have been at odds since the June protests over API pricing changes that ultimately forced some third-party apps to shut down. At one point, more than 8,000 communities went dark in protest, but as the protests wore on, Reddit began sending messages to moderators pushing them to reopen, and in an interview, CEO Steve Huffman characterized moderators as “landed gentry.” Reddit’s pushback largely worked, and now, just under 2,000 subreddits remain dark, according to the Reddark tracker.

In Wednesday’s post, the admin, who goes by the username Go_JasonWaterfalls, acknowledged the strife. “So, we’ve all had a… time on Reddit lately,” said the admin. “And I’m here to recognize it, acknowledge that our relationship has been tested, and begin the ‘now what?’ conversation.” (I have asked Reddit if Go_JasonWaterfalls is the username of Laura Nestler, who is listed on Reddit’s website as the company’s VP of community, but haven’t heard back.)

The admin is inviting moderators to engage with the company in a few ways:

• Weekly mod feedback sessions with “small groups of mods” to discuss “the needs of users, mods, admins, and communities (including how subreddits are, and should be, governed)”
• The Reddit Mod Council, “a collaboration between Reddit admins and moderators,” and Partner Communities program, which gives select communities increased support from Reddit and “access to special services and programs”
• An accessibility feedback group, which will meet monthly
• In-person “Mod Roadshows” across the globe
• An online Global Mod Summit on December 2nd

The highest-ranked replies are very critical of the post. “What good is our feedback when reddit seems perfectly happy to ignore all of it?” wrote one user. “What’s the point?” Another pointed out that Huffman called mods “landed gentry.” “Show, don’t tell,” wrote another user — to which the admin replied, “Agreed.”

MostlyBlindGamer, a mod for r/Blind, took issue with the company’s approach to accessibility. “Reddit has yet to make the suggested email address for reporting accessibility bugs available. r/Blind mods have reported that the bug report page does not work with assistive technology. The Send button in modmail doesn’t work properly on Android with a screen reader,” MostlyBlindGamer wrote. “Can you speak to these issues? They have a serious impact on our perception of Reddit Inc’s ability to follow through on accessibility.” As of this writing, the admin hasn’t replied to that.

Despite Reddit’s outreach, I would expect some users are going to continue to be dissatisfied; in addition to the API changes killing some apps, users are also unhappy with Reddit’s decisions to remove chat history from before 2023 and sunset the current version of its Reddit Gold awards system. And with Reddit opening up another r/Place experiment on Thursday, users may soon have a big new canvas to express their discontent.

The admin concluded their post on Wednesday rather abruptly. “I don’t have an ending to this post, really,” they wrote. “Hopefully this post is a beginning.”

“A beginning of what?” replied one user. “This solves nothing, and just wastes everybody’s time.”