The landed gentry are only in charge until the king comes to town and chops off a few heads. At least that seems to be the case at Reddit, where CEO Steve Huffman pretended his complaints about current moderators — who were protesting his decision to effectively cut off API access to tons of useful…
Reddit used to mediate with their users on what the users thought was the best way forward for the site to continue existing. Ads and reddit gold initially were a compromise created by an active dialogue between users and admins.
Once reddit decided they were big enough, that the risk of user loss was minimal, they just literally stopped having that dialogue. Changes to the site continued (more ads, more data harvesting, changes to the UI) with no user input. When that happened, when they stopped listening, it was only a matter of time.