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Like I said, I'm not party to Reddit's internal corporate thinking. But I think it's a pretty good educated guess to say: Reddit's decision was not based upon what would optimize Reddit's social functions. When Reddit made this decision, I'm feeling pretty confident it was not a *social engineering* decision. It was not made to make Reddit function better in some social sense. Nobody made this decision thinking, "Actually, reducing the capacity of moderators to do tasks that are part of moderation will actually improve the social reality of Reddit in this particular way."

At very best, this decision was made to optimize something else in full awareness, "Yes, this will be detrimental to Reddit's social world, but it can't be helped, because of other considerations that outrank quality of social engineering right now."

But of course, the social effect on Reddit might have been simply dismissed, or discounted.

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