I think it's a bit of a "google" mindset, which has become pervasive in the industry really. The idea of concentrating on managing a product, a platform, a system, etc. and giving short shrift to the community and interfacing with your user base. This is aggravated by the preponderance of free services, such as reddit, which make it all the easier to write off such interactions as non-productive. Instead there's an attempt to interact with the "community" and the "user base" as a conglomerate whole, but ultimately that's a weak method of interacting, at some point the rubber has to meet the road and that means person to person interactions and relationships. This is why sales people are so damned valuable, because that sort of interaction is hugely important.

P.S. To clear up any confusion, I support reddit's recent closure of hateful sub-reddits, there should be limits to the kind of behavior reddit tolerates. But that's an entirely different issue from their problem of engaging with mods of popular sub-reddits. It seems like there are a lot of people around who want to stir up ill will against reddit because they enjoyed playing in the cess-pool parts of it.