Comment by danpalmer

Clearly not otherwise that wouldn't be a feature. The issue is that there is no official stance. Any actual stance would be an admission of madness in the approach - "No taking your sub private to protest Reddit platform changes" wouldn't go down well even though that's what it is. They're trying again and again to keep things quiet, even though they keep running into the Streisand effect, something Reddit should be acutely familiar with already. There is also that saying that trying the same thing again and again and expecting a different result is insanity.

This all strikes me as Reddit and in particular their senior leadership being deeply scared. They know they probably missed the mark for IPO, they could have done it during phases of massive growth a number of years ago, or perhaps in the recently concluded tech IPO boom, but they didn't. They're now shit-scared that they are falling out of favour and losing the support of thought-leaders in the community. I'm sure user/revenue numbers are looking better than ever, but I'm also sure that the leading metrics are showing the valuable users abandoning ship and retention metrics starting to turn.

It's unfortunately unlikely to get better if they keep taking this reactionary approach, but doing anything else is a much harder move that requires strong leadership, and they've never been known for having strong leadership, except perhaps under Ellen.