I feel like it was a situation where the few are in power because the huddled masses don't know that they can actually revolt. The admins have been neglecting

I feel like it was a situation where the few are in power because the huddled masses don't know that they can actually revolt. The admins have been neglecting tools and moderators for quite a while, and you can see a trend over the last ~3 months of more and more general unhappiness with the site. The admins didn't think the moderators would realize it, but they did. They found a peaceful protest that the reddit admins absolutely have to address, either by fixing things, or by abandoning all credibility and removing the mods from their subreddits.