Some people were noticing, early in the thread, big steps up on the net vote a couple minutes after each comment, which triggered some suspicion of similar shenanigans.

I just realized all the threats of going private are a bit moot because guess who controls the database where this flag is set?

It'd be a massive fuck you to the community, but how would that be different to what's been going on the last few months?

I'm guessing the company will be like an abusive partner saying "we're in control, you can leave, but we know you won't."

Yes and no. They can force the the subs to go public again, but then the mods might quit. Losing a lot of mods is a bigger deal than losing the same number of users.

Trying to find a bunch of new mods will probably be an issue. Right now there isn't _too much_ complaining about mods. It's a very fine balance and replacing a bunch of existing ones with new ones might cause mayhem.

They've "organically" couped mods into subs to return them to normal operation in the past.