Now Reddit are coming for the individual personal subreddits

So... why have the feature of "Public, Restricted, Private" if you punish people for using a feature you all put in place? If they don't want private subs, then convert them to public and turn that feature off.

What all this seems like is a bad psy-op campaign to force people to do the settings the admins want, and make it "feel" its the moderators doing it. Similar how Twitter forces you to remove bad content rather than just auto-do it

This is leftpad all over again: the intersection of publicly accessible namespaces, control over those namespaces, and what people in charge of the namespace are allowed to do by the platform when their protest actions are seen as harmful by the platform.

There's a 3-way social contract between the platform (Reddit/npm), the nominal person in charge (mods/module authors) and the users. If the person in charge does something that is sufficiently disruptive to users', or platforms interests, the platform will step in. We can argue about where the line is, but beyond that point, platform intervention is inevitable.

Edit: Thought experiment: would it have been acceptable had the author of leftpad put up a poll for downloaders to vote before taking the module down in protest?