This is the part that gets me. We're clearly getting PR-talk from Alexis. That would be fine if the expectation of Alexis was that he would simply be the Exec

This is the part that gets me. We're clearly getting PR-talk from Alexis. That would be fine if the expectation of Alexis was that he would simply be the Executive Chair of the Board of Directors. But that's not what was expected. Those of us who were around reddit when kn0thing and spez ran the place and it was held together with duct tape and good intentions remember someone who was an active member of the community and who truly had the community's interests at heart. We thought when he returned that we were getting that Alexis back, and we were happy. But that Alexis appears to have "matured" into a vanilla businessman, and that's fine. What isn't fine is the mass exodus of admins who were actually redditors, the bringing in of a CEO whose goals clearly align more with monetizing than nurturing, and a series of decisions that have shown the remaining braintrust at reddit to have grown further and further away from the community. It's fine to monetize reddit. It's fine to run it like a real, live company. What's not fine is to do that to the exclusion of all else, and risk jeopardizing the very community that gives the site value in the first place. What we've seen from the actions of the executive team at reddit in recent months suggests that they simply don't understand how their actions are being perceived. They've either lost or pushed out the people at the company who had a finger on the pulse of the community, and now they're flying blind. It seems that the only thing keeping reddit going right now as a community is the lack of a viable alternative, and that's a very dangerous place to be for a company like reddit. I don't know whether the executive team at reddit sees this episode as just another fire to put out or as a portent of things to come. What I see, as an active participant on the site, is a restive user base that increasingly sees itself as neglected and taken for granted by a dismissive and aloof leadership. There are many things keeping the user base in reddit's orbit, but most of those things come down to inertia and lack of a better alternative. If the latter is solved, the former will take care of itself, and reddit will hit a tipping point whereby its most engaged users leave en masse. It's not there yet, but it's an existential threat that it doesn't appear the reddit brain trust is taking seriously.