Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not sure I would consider mods unilaterally shutting down their forums and hiding information that was contributed by millions of other people a triumph for the wider community. Speaking as somebody who only ever visits Reddit when a thread appears in a search result and occasionally replies if the mods didn't implement a policy of automatically deleting posts from outsiders, now the information I need is not there,…
I’d say with you being a passive observer, you are clearly not a part of that community. Voting wise, all communities I’ve seen were pretty overwhelmingly in favor.
That exclusiveness is exactly my point. It seems for some people the "community" is narrowly defined to mean only those who are highly active Reddit users of very specific forums - so much so that they both visit frequently enough and feel strongly enough to vote on voluntary polls about shutting those forums down. The broader community of people who visit the site and post from time to time most likely never saw any of these polls and wouldn't have bothered voting even if they did. I think those people are still part of the community. To me, a city wouldn't be much of a community if the only people whose opinions mattered were those who had the time to attend council meetings.