This is amazing. So many of reddit's problems I've heard described in terms of the ultimate root issue that the site can never ever violate a mod's god-given constitutional right to keep the subreddit they've started and planted their flag on. So if the mod of /r/news hypothetically just stopped moderating and let the subreddit fall apart and become full of racist shitposts, there's nothing that could be done -- everyone should just move to another subreddit, and all the newbies typing /r/news and ending up in a defunct shithole should just figure it out for themselves. This is how you got all those /r/truexxxxx subreddits. A subreddit was not a democracy, the mod owned it. Even if the whole community wanted something, their will was insignificant before this prime directive.

I always thought this was a strange hill to die on. But seeing reddit say "oh... now that it's inconvenient to us personally, that's a different story"... wow