Yes, they can and they have done so occasionally.

It hasn’t been addressed because so far it has been used relatively sparingly, and because the subreddits in question are often shut down by Reddit rather than handed over to a new head moderator.

Often it happens because the mod(s) refuse to enforce sitewide rules on their subreddit. The removals are usually preceded by encouragement from admin to sharpen up, followed by warnings and milder measures.

Historically, Reddit has been slow to act on that stuff of its own accord, only doing so when users organise to alert advertisers to the content their ads are appearing alongside.

You will see users of these subreddits complain that their communities are being targeted, especially if Reddit has acted against a cluster of related behaviours, but that latter bit does mean that those users tend to seek out other places. I don’t want to compare those fleeing to Lemmy/kbin/mastodon to proponents of political violence or those running foreign disinformation campaigns, but the principle of Reddit pushing a given class of users away from the site remains the same.

I suspect that Reddit has miscalculated here, or is just gunning to manipulate the apparent user metrics ahead of the IPO, but it seems to me that they actively want to shed everyone who is privacy-conscious, tech-literate, etc. They don’t want conversations about old.reddit or 3rd party apps or the fediverse influencing those who are unaware of these things, and they don’t want users or moderators who will organise against Reddit They already have power mods who have been running large numbers of the most popular subreddits for years and some of these may be paid admin; they’d find it easy to get people to replace the head mods of smaller communities, and they probably don’t care about the niche subreddits and will either let those die or trial the use of bot moderators on them.

Curious about the subs that have reverted to public already… r/stocks just now & saw a few revert last night.

Struggling a lot with this lately.

Had been using DDG for years without any problems, but it became unusably bad for me a while ago. Tried Qwant and Startpage, which were an improvement, though not great, then began to struggle with them also.

Briefly had a good time with some Searx instances, but must be doing something badly wrong (or am developing early onset dementia, hahaha) as can no longer get it to work well either.

In short, I can get up Wikipedia entries & usually major websites providing I use a single search term, but can seldom get more complex searches to work no matter what operands I use.

Hoping to find something that suits, as it is quite frustrating.

Ah sweet, I’m definitely here.

Thank you for popping up so fast with the reassurance.

Hrm,

I didn’t sign up with an email, but was able to login shortly after applying (less than 30 mins, I think?).

From my end it seems as if I am able to subscribe to communities and reply to things, and was also able to login via mlem, but now wondering whether I’m really here at all…

If any passing Beehawers are able to read this and feel like letting me know, I’d be so grateful.