> a segment of their website? It's not yours. It never was.

That's really not been the ethos advertised to moderators until now; it was more that unless you caused site instability (legal or otherwise) it was yours to run as you please.

You may be speaking a literal truth, but the emotive background is relevant here.

At the same time, Reddit entirely depends on these people to keep these segments of website safe and decent (not to mention ad-friendly). And these people depended on efficient 3rd party tools to carry out this form of free labor.

It is a much more delicate balance of power than what is found on most other social platforms. Some described (aptly in my view) this status quo as more akin to feudalism than to a nation state. Yeah the "land" may belong to you, but being nice to your stewards goes a long way if you want your head to remain attached to your neck.

And at the same time, reddit has the balls to advertise itself as s great place to build a community for your product or company. How can anyone trust them not to take over your community when they feel like it?

Yeah, the dude politely asked for 4-6 weeks of closure time.. hard to believe that he expected Reddit to find this reasonable. Unfortunately, the admins probably lack bandwidth to go back and forth on these things and so they just yeeted the top mod rather than tell him that's unacceptable.