I'm going to offer a wild suggestion - What if reddit is being purposefully dismantled to break up the social hive it represents? Is it possible that current events are he fruition of a purposeful strategy?
The whole dust up over /r/fph and the few other little subs kinda horrified me. I think reddit has often veered too far into laxness (the LONG existence of /r/jailbait) and there is still an amazing ton of blatant rule violations going on.
The only problem I had with the /r/fph thing was how inconsistently enforced it was. It seemed like a ban against a relatively small group so they wouldn't have to deal with pissing off one of the bigger problem subs. It ended up looking like a fake token gesture.
I'm sure leadership is willing to gamble that they can disrupt the hive without killing it. But will the owners continue to go down that road?