Honest question: How do you (or whoever is doing the takeover) know "what people want"?

After all we are talking about subreddits that somehow got popular with what they were doing... So why does a popular subreddit have to change and why do the people who made the subreddit into the popular thing it was have to find a new place instead of whoever has a problem with how things are done making their own and new place?

Well, democracy answers this by asking people directly. So one way to do it is poll the sub's members. Or, you could see whether the stuff that gets deleted was highly voted before it was deleted. If people don't like certain content, it won't get voted up.

I'm not sure which cases of hostile takeovers they're referring to, so I don't know what happened there, but presumably they either had a mod on their side, or got an admin to step in. The mod's behavior must have been pretty bad if an admin intervened.

If you pull the "the majority decides" card then there is no decision necessary. Each subreddit is defined by the majority of its users. Simple as that.

Not necessarily. The algorithms that do the sorting might be biased toward certain content (for instance, if it highly values quickly upvoted content, it would be biased toward short memes and against long-form articles). Reddit voting isn't just a straight majority vote.

A subreddit is not a democracy. As a moderator, I can do mostly whatever I please and you're welcome to stay or start your own subreddit.

I don't understand why you'd say that if an admin did something then the mod's behavior must have been pretty bad. Define bad? Bad for reddit's public image? Bad for monetization?

It must have been worse than just "they don't remove dank memes", as originally suggested.

We never defined what bad and worse mean...

>As long as this is true, what's wrong with taking over a sub, if that's what the people want? Making a new sub requires getting everyone to change.

If what you're about to do after taking over was actually "what the people want" then you wouldn't have to take over.

Well there's no direct way for users to overthrow mods by majority vote. You need to take over by appealing to mods or admins.

Ironically - The lack of sub discovery is directly related to the development of auto mod.

If you remember when r/trees broke out of r/weed, people found out about the new sub because there was no auto mod bot which went and removed key words.