> There is some competition between subreddits for attention

The existing sub-subreddits organically evolved from disputes between more primary subreddits about the type of content users wanted to see; e.g. r/atheism decides they don't want low-quality meme posts, so r/atheismmemes is created. If reddit were to simply remove the mods from thousands of subreddits, it could easily sour those communities.

>There is some competition between subreddits for attention, and a bad mod team can cause a subreddit to lose that competition (including to subreddits on different subjects), so there is some amount of successful community building that must have happened.

Yeah but they need to be BAD. "Mediocre enough that users don't want to migrate elsewhere" (like /r/games) seems to be enough to keep it running and gaining subs just fine

r/games was once the upstart and had to gain enough users who wanted something more moderated/curated than r/gaming to get to its current position.

And now sticky with mods declaring "well, we will not do anything about the situation" sits at 0 upvotes (in reddit speak: it got more downvotes and upvotes), with a bunch of well-upvoted comments about how sub should participate in the protest. They are completely detached from their userbase.

I just read the sticky and those are some real stupid reasons to not blackout the sub, and instead just made a half-assed attempt to participate.

I've never visited r/games and now I'm glad I never have.

Don't forget the epic story of the fall of r/worldpolitics and the rise of r/anime_titties as its replacement.

Except on April 1st, of course.

* * *

r/worldpolitics gradually became overtaken by US politics since Reddit is so dominated by US users. This displeased international users, as r/politics was already US-centric politics, and so r/worldpolitics had been seen as a place to discuss rest of world politics.

The head mod did not agree, and after a couple of years of the sub being basically unmoderated and 90% US politics, and generating user complaints as a result, threw a tantrum and said anything goes, and posted a load of anime porn.

Since the subreddit named world politics was now full of anime porn, and a little inspired by the subreddit r/marijuanaenthusiasts (the subreddit about Botany, since r/trees was taken by the weed people), a bunch of users decided to create a subreddit called r/anime_titties for discussing non-US politics.

Ah.

And yes, I'm familiar with /r/trees and /r/marijuanaenthusiasts, a couple of favourite examples.