Well, as other people have said, it looks like they were preparing to sell Reddit, or take it public, or whatever, and they wanted to make it look as profitable and purchaseable as possible.
The end result is the same, but the reasoning is a bit different.
Anyhow, if that's true, I dare say they've achieved the opposite result now.
Tried that. It didn't take. Even though I tired remove myself, I was put back on somehow.
And the unmoderated sub can be picked back up by anyone who requests it. It's how a lot of old porn subs got turned into subs about cats.
I once made a sub, and no one joined it. I then found out that you can't shut one down. Every. You can abandon it, and reddit will hand it over to the first person who asks for it, but once a sub is open it can never, ever be closed.
You can hand it over though. Or at least, that is how things used to go.
It's also the no 1 best selling video game of all time, by a sizable margin, so it would be a big deal regardless.
People are focusing on the house in the middle, but if you look at he whole picture, it isn't that one house. It's every single house on both streets. It's not just this specific owner. If this were the US, I'd suspect a HOA at work.
This kind of behavior is what got me to join Lemmy just now. (this is my first ever post in fact.)
I really wasn't even onboard with the boycott. I thought it was silly and pointless and was planning to just stay on reddit, but then he had to tantrum like a child and go against the very spirit and point of reddit in process.
So here I am. I haven't deleted my years old reddit account yet, but I probably will at this point. This lemmy federation thing seems like it will do quite nicely.
Turning everyone into mods is a horrible idea, because reddit will hand over ownership of any sub doing any kind of protests to the first mod that contacts them and asks for it. At least one sub was taken over because of that by a person who had basically no clue about what they were doing.
It's dangerous and just asking for Reddit to take over.