I am going to be unpopular for saying this, but from reddits point of view it makes complete sense. Content they "have" is not viewable, so users that make it unviewable need to be removed.
A vast majority of users on reddit just consumes, they don't post. Maybe comments but not actual posts. So by making those users be able to view everything again, they will keep them on the site.
We can just hope that content quality goes down which would drive users away, but thats more a longterm thing.
It make sense, but reddit also gave mods tools to go private. They gave mods the power to mod their sub as they pleased until they didn't like it. A "no, not like that" scenario
True but it is also "their" site. So they can do as they please if necessary. I am not sure how anyone is surprised at that. But in turn this now shows what will happen in the future if you try anything out of line, so I hope people who had considered being a mod are not going to anymore.
Just to be clear, I don't condone this behaviour, it is pretty shitty. But what else are they supposed to do if they want to keep the site running. Giving in to users demands seems not an option anymore, and to be fair, it is far too late to give in. Who of us really would return happily if they now said they are not going to charge for API access, how could anyone believe them now?
I would 100% return to Reddit if they stopped this. I can't bring back my deleted history and I won't resub to everything. I'd still keep Lemmy for actual discussion on high visibility topics (you can't have a conversation with 10,000 people on Reddit). But I would absolutely go back until they tried this shit again.