Reddit, which endured a firestorm of outrage from many of its unpaid site moderators in July when a popular director of talent, Victoria Taylor, was fired, is quietly trying to smooth the waters.

Co-founder Alexis Ohanian, has hired Wynter Mitchell for the new job of head of talent and partnerships.

The blowback from the firing of Taylor, who coordinated the popular Ask me Anything site, eventually triggered the departure of interim CEO Ellen Pao.

In the days after Taylor’s dismissal, an online petition was signed by 200,000 people calling for Pao’s ouster. The unpaid moderators shut down nearly 2,000 of the site’s communities in protest.

Ohanian, in an earlier post, said that it had been his decision. “It was my decision to change how we work with AMAs and the transition was my failure and I hope we can keep moving forward from that lesson,” he wrote.

Pao in her July note, said, “I’ve seen the good, the bad and the ugly on Reddit. The good has been off-the-wall inspiring, and the ugly made me doubt humanity.”

Mitchell, a onetime celebrity writer for Us Weekly, has worked at SpinMedia, where she supervised Celebuzz and other celebrity sites and put together the blog site for Kim Kardashian.