In a comment shared by r/Apple moderator @aaronp613, Reddit cited its Moderator Code of Conduct and said that it has a duty to keep communities “relied upon by thousands or even millions of users” operational. Mods who do not agree to reopen subreddits that have gone private will be removed.
If a moderator team unanimously decides to stop moderating, we will invite new, active moderators to keep these spaces open and accessible to users. If there is no consensus, but at least one mod wants to keep the community going, we will respect their decisions and remove those who no longer want to moderate from the mod team.
Yes, they installed a new head mod and the new head mod bans anyone who brings it up. The new mod is a moderator of 106 different subreddits.
The funny thing is that many people remaining on reddit have been praising the admins for threatening to remove mods, because they hate the power mods who control all the subs and want to see them removed, but that’s exactly who reddit is using to replace the mods they dislike.
I honestly wouldn’t be surprised if some of these moderators are actually PR Firms or similar.