I’ll start believing in Reddit’s commitment to direct democracy when users will be able to also vote out admins and u/spez if they don’t like their decisions.

Until then, it’s just corporatism under the guise of some fluffy words.

but the problem is these people want it to be done by the service/devs/whatever.

I’ll give people the benefit of the doubt. Coming from a centralized service means people are used to things working in a certain way, and they may just not have considered all the advantages of not being forced into a single, centralized service.