The furor surrounding the firing of popular Reddit administrator Victoria Taylor took a new turn on Friday, when company CEO Ellen Pao commented on the resulting backlash.

After Taylor's termination, several Reddit boards were set to private by their respective moderators, in a show of protest against the decision.

See also: Large parts of Reddit shut as users revolt against firing of admin

Facing mounting criticism from the link-sharing community, Pao finally spoke out by commenting on a thread titled, "Reddit alternatives? Other Subs going private to protest the direction Reddit has been going."

She wrote:

The bigger problem is that we haven't helped our moderators with better support after many years of promising to do so. We do value moderators; they allow reddit to function and they allow each subreddit to be unique and to appeal to different communities. This year, we have started building better tools for moderators and for admins to help keep subreddits and reddit awesome, but our infrastructure is monolithic, and it is going to take some time. We hired someone to product manage it, and we moved an engineer to help work on it. We hired 5 more people for our community team in total to work with both the community and moderators. We are also making changes to reddit.com, adding new features like better search and building mobile web, but our testing plan needs improvement. As a result, we are breaking some of the ways moderators moderate. We are going to figure this out and fix it.

Responses to Pao's comment suggest that she hasn't appeased users who are still upset over Taylor's sudden departure.

"Ellen has been attempting to resolve this issue with brute force instead of personally taking responsibility and admitting she does not have the solution and needs to understand things from the community's perspective," wrote Redditor Kaizyx.

"I want to apologize to our community for yesterday," Pao said in a separate statement on Friday. "We handled the transition in a way that caused some disruption, and we should have done a better job."

A Change.org petition, which launched last month, calls for Pao to step down from her position at Reddit. After Friday's controversy, it gained more steam, and has amassed nearly 96,000 signatures at the time of this writing. The petition references Pao's gender-discrimination lawsuit against venture capital firm Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield and Byers, and claims that many in the Reddit community feel Pao has "overstepped her boundaries and fears that she will run Reddit into the ground."

If the petition reaches its 150,000-signature goal, Advance Publications, parent company of Reddit (and Condé Nast), is under no obligation to force Pao out. However, it would be a major blow to her public standing among Redditors, who drive much of the site's popularity.