“He added that he plans to make changes to moderator policies so users can vote them out. Currently, a higher-ranking moderator — or the company — can boot out moderators. Incidentally, a r/Apple moderator posted on Twitter (via 9to5Mac) that Reddit was threatening to remove moderators who are staging an indefinite blackout.”
It “makes sense” if you view Reddit by looking only at the total number of Reddit users and not considering differing levels of engagement. If you’ve got tens of millions of people subscribed to a sub, it’s easy to let your ego take the wheel and say, “Fuck 'em! So what if we lose a million users? We’ve got plenty more!”
It doesn’t make sense if you realize that the “users” most likely to be alienated by your actions are the moderators and regular contributors whose participation creates the community of that subreddit. You’ve got the mods, who handle the bombthrowers, and the regular contributors who shape the sub in their own way by being mostly on-topic and mostly helpful. They’re often the ones who throw the ball back into the ring before the mods have to step in, and some of them are pretty entertaining, too.
IMO, Reddit is likely to lose a disproportionate share of mods and power users and spez doesn’t get that. I think he believes all users are fungible, and they’re not. He thinks he can tough this out and things will blow over. He’s wrong. Reddit won’t disappear, any more than Twitter has, but I sure as hell wouldn’t buy stock when the IPO happens. If it happens.