Fair enough, I appreciate your perspective. Here is an attempt to communicate my own, as someone "closer" to Reddit:

For very many habitual users of Reddit, the way in which it is probably most valuable is as the canonical general discussion forum of the web. An important part of the infrastructure of their perception and interpretation of the world around them, for pretty much any domain beyond the most incommunicably personal.

To read Reddit can be, in a surprisingly real way, like participating in a collective consciousness -- with all the addictive dependence [I say that in a non-judgemental way, not being able to come up with a less negative way to characterize it at the moment] that the type of speculative fiction which imagines such living arrangements usually predicts.

The practical side of this is that, for any given news event, cultural phenomenon, popularly-circulating idea, whatever: for these users it is instinctive to consult the reddit threads on the topic, as a deeply-ingrained part of their process for digesting and interpreting it. That those reddit threads will exist and have an active discussion on any given topic is a given. Even if the local source of a news piece has a forum/thread of its own, it is fundamentally not the same thing.

It's been, in a hazy golden age that may have never actually existed, something close a total function for processing the events of the world, big and small.

One day, there was an event, a dumb internet drama event, but one for which the primary Reddit discussion thread was displaying a count of 20 thousand comments -- but on inspection, every single last one of those was showing up as [deleted]. That was the start of it for most users. Many have fixated on the specific topic of that initial drama as the source of the problem with Reddit, and many others have fixated on this fixation as the source of the problem with Reddit.

But there is a general sense that this is growing, spreading, and mutating, and seems to be cropping up in places that are not strictly predictable.

For example, there are persistent rumours that several of the more popular subreddits for which the news would be directly and explicitly on-topic, are systematically removing discussions about various global trade agreements currently being negotiated. Is it true? Maybe, maybe not, but the trust is broken.

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The main thing is (the perception that):

Now there is a partial function where before there was a total function. That is disastrous damage in an information processing system.

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To these users, this is a very profound and frightening piece of damage, having extended a part of their cognition into this machinery that now seems to be failing. Panic sets in, which obviously means wild flailing at anything that pops its head up and can be in any way seen as responsible for the damage.

Hence, the reaction to Ellen Pao. Especially after she made public statements of purpose that were easily interpretable by these users to the effect of "whatever else might be the source of the damage to your extended cognition, we intent to start deliberately doing some more damage to areas we don't consider important".

In the end, I very strongly suspect that the problem is much deeper and probably well beyond any control of the central management. If there were a way to, I would put money down on the prediction that the Reddit crisis, a direct continuation of the exact same crisis that's currently associated with Ellen Pao, will continue.