People love to say this, but a critical look at the structure of reddit shows how little this argument matches reality. Reddit is a strongly cohesive group of s

People love to say this, but a critical look at the structure of reddit shows how little this argument matches reality. Reddit is a strongly cohesive group of sub-forums. When millions of users are driven to subreddits by reddit's choice of defaults, when popular subreddits are driven more traffic by r/all, when linking to other subreddits is a part of the culture, etc, all of this points to a strong coupling. It is disingenuous to claim that subreddits are completely independent and thus one cannot claim reddit as a whole bears responsibility for its content. Yes, they are independently managed, but there are a thousand other ways in which the strong cohesiveness is created. This cohesiveness creates responsibility among the larger subreddits to the userbase as a whole. Unfortunately the rules of moderation don't recognize this and as a result you end up with essentially arbitrary users who have had massive amounts of power dumped in their lap through accident of timing (rather than proof that they have the capacity to cultivate a large community). Unilateral decisions are made and their userbase (that they had little to no hand in creating) is forced to suffer as a result. Reddit really needs to rethink how massive subreddits that are/were defaults are moderated.