Reddit faked their initial users to make the site seem used. Pulling the plug during protests surely is in the realm of possibility for what they could do.

It's likely true that most people just browse, don't login, and don't subscribe to subreddits they enjoy. Of course those people don't contribute to their site either, although they do see the advertisements.

Anyway for those of us that do login and follow specific topics, I can speak for my own experience, which is that every single subreddit I read was shutdown this morning other than r/worldnews and r/diablo4.

It’s easily 90% of the subs that people actually go to Reddit for.

Nobody cares about the 400 subscriber subreddit from some small town in Idaho with 3 people online at any given moment.

1.2% of subs does not imply that 1.2% of the user base is gone. A lot of those 500k subs have less than 5k subscribers. Only a small portion of subreddits contribute to the vast amount of content on reddit.

You're right. I took an overly naive view of how a complex system would respond to such an unusual event.