The other thing is that they’ve just handled things so incredibly badly. Limited communication largely directed at third-party media sites, erratic rules changes and enforcement, doubling down with heavy-handed admin actions.
I think that even beyond a need for profit they lost sight of why they have substantial value in the first place. The majority of their value came from their community which made “the front page of the internet” a pretty honest claim. Their software isn’t worth billions, but the front page of the internet sure is. They should have had a substantial community engagement department specifically to kiss ass and build relationships with mods (and users via AMAs) so that open lines of communication existed - and they probably should have taken control over key things like inserting an employee as top mod of the top 50 subs (make it standard practice for hitting top 50, offer cool extra services like a visit to HQ and such for the mods so its like they “win” rather than “reddit seizes control” even if that’s what it is).
Instead they stayed way too hands-off and basically treated their community as an afterthought. The poor communication made me feel disrespected as a user, so I can only imagine what its like for the mods who put far more time and effort in and are in the direct line of fire of erratic admin actions. I mean, this isn’t even hard. Just make a vague corporate statement that you’re “very sorry” about all the “confusion” and you’ll be “putting changes on hold an re-evaluating while you work with various parties to come up with solutions”. You make some token concessions and then do 80% of what you were gonna do anyway, 1-2 months later. Its dishonest and shitty but it’s not rocket science to take some of the fuel away from the fire. Like, do they even have a PR department or… did they completely forget that the community even mattered?
Oh boy. Try Space Exploration. It’s like Factorio^2.
But to be clear its not just pure pain and suffering with stupid complexity (look up Pyanodons if you want that), SE is actually incredibly well designed as an expansion that isn’t just for masochists. Your first rocket is maybe 30% quicker to launch than in the base game… but launching your first rocket is kinda like building your first inserter: now the game really starts.