First, I want to say I am not defending Reddit's actions over the past several months or anything Steve Huffman has done during that time. That's not what I am

First, I want to say I am not defending Reddit's actions over the past several months or anything Steve Huffman has done during that time. That's not what I am arguing here at all. What I am arguing is that Reddit did have an established doctrine around subreddits. That doctrine was to give as much autonomy (and free speech) as possible to people who create subreddits. And that was intentional, not a result of lack of planning. Until now, this has been backed up by their actions over a long timespan. There were many subreddits that Reddit allowed to exist that are almost inconceivable today and only banned after enduring long campaigns of immense public pressure. When they did ban them they changed site guidelines to reflect new rules. I think overall, the additional content guidelines that were hammered out through this process are fair. I think content guidelines that ban content that may not be illegal but are harmful makes sense. Things like "No non consensual pornography" (aka revenge porn) and "No advocating violence towards groups of people" (no organized racism) are very reasonable. But it also allowed for subreddits to be created that Reddit as an organization would never have thought of or been able to nourish to a point they became very large. I really think that's what Reddit's secret sauce is and has been. Gigantic subreddits like r/IAmA, r/todayilearned, r/wholesomememes came from users and grew organically. Yes, this approach has had downsides such as the emergence of powermods and the creation of bad subreddits like r/jailbait and r/fatpeoplehate. Because of the numerous issues I outlined above, I'm not sure Reddit would have been successfully able to implement or outline a process for keeping the magic of subreddits and a fair system that scales for removing mods and they had no incentive to try. They're going to have to try now though, because I don't think there is any coming back from this.