I’m just annoyed the local community group I primarily use Reddit for is dark. I don’t see why this helps anyone. Reddit is a private company, go someplace else. I think 99% of users don’t care, or don’t care enough to do anything substantial. Just move on.
At a certain point, some "private company" must be so important that it becomes an essential service. Maybe Reddit isn't at that point yet, but that you're frustrated it's gone suggests that it is important. If an essential service is privatized, then its owners have a huge amount of leverage over how we live our lives and how we engage with technology. For instance, Apple tries to prohibit apps not on the App Store…
In my own personal opinionated mental wargaming, with which you are all welcome to disagree, Reddit is literally just a few dozen hours from making that outcome very likely, and the clock is steadily ticking. Wargame out their options if their communities don't budge and the stalemate extends past this week. If Reddit will not back down, they have basically only one other option, which is to lever away the moderator positions for all the private reddits and replace them. If they do, that may superficially work for a while (though IMHO even that is not guaranteed) but the end result would still be the fastest and hardest case of social media evaporative cooling history has ever seen: https://blogs.cornell.edu/info2040/2015/10/14/the-evaporativ...
Moreover, while the technical task of levering away the subreddit moderators is a single SQL query away (more or less), the job of resuscitating those communities is not. Even if we assume that all the non-moderators on reddit just shrug and get back to redditing, Reddit can't possibly find enough moderators of any kind to moderate that amount of content. At this point the wargame branches out into several options Reddit can take to try to solve this with their current personpower, but none of the ones I can come up with will actually, you know, work. (Closest is to try to query the DB for most active users and make them the new moderators, but merely "most active" is actually not a great criterion, and it will correlate closely with "people who got angry and left" so there is a LOOOOOOOT of manual labor in that process. You can just run the SQL query and surprise announce the new moderators but that really won't work either.) As many have pointed out, moderators are providing an awful lot of free labor. Reddit can easily throw that free labor away but they can not just trivially reconstruct it if they do.
As a moderator myself, I have my reasons for doing what I do, in the amount that I do, for free, and I am satisfied with the arrangement. However, if they do lever me off, I will not be lifting a finger for them. I actually won't be all that perturbed about it either... "oh, no, I can't provide free services to your company anymore gosh geewillikers whatever will I do", I know exactly what I will do, which is move on. I've been on the internet for over 25 years. Moving on is part of the deal. Someday I'm sure I'll move on from HN.