“I want to apologize for how we handled the transition yesterday,” Pao said in a statement issued Friday. “We should have informed the moderators earlier and provided more detail on the transition plan. We are working to make improvements and create the best experience for our users and we aren’t always perfect. Our community is what makes Reddit, Reddit and we let you down.”

Taylor had a reputation for being loved by the site’s many volunteer moderators, in large part because she was especially responsive to questions and concerns. She also helped coordinate and schedule many high-profile AMAs, legitimizing the subreddit with interviewees like President Obama.

Pao posted to Reddit on Friday, directly addressing the community incensed by her actions:

“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.”

At the time of writing, the petition calling for Pao to resign has drawn more than 190,000 signatures from disgruntled users who feel Pao “has overstepped her boundaries” and “will run Reddit into the ground.”

The number of signatures grew exponentially after Taylor’s firing, but more than 10,000 users had already pledged their support for the petition beforehand, citing concerns of censorship after Pao introduced stricter anti-harassment policies and removed five subreddits that were in violation of those guidelines. (The community manager of image site Imgur, which is widely used to share photos and GIFs to Reddit, came under fire recently as well for enforcing content guidelines.)

The AMA subreddit, in particular, benefitted greatly from Taylor’s work during her time at Reddit: Its moderators noted in a post that she had been “a pillar of the AMA community and responsible for nearly all of reddit’s positive press.”