Actually it was a reaction by the Reddit community to management idiocy.
As such, it was entirely justified.
You don't seem to understand how this works. Reddit does not own the community. Reddit hosts the community, and in return the community provides content for Reddit.
The community has already moved from another provider, and if Reddit carries on with more management idiocy, it will move again.
Social is littered with the crumbling ruins of corps that believed they were too big to fail, but which fell off the world after Doing Stupid Shit for too long.
You are defining the community as people who interact with the site (or maybe content creators). I am defining it as people who visit the site. The old 90-10-1 rule suggests the community how you define it is only a small subset of the community how I defined it. If someone doesn't care enough to even create an account on Reddit, what makes you think they have strong feeling about the personnel decisions of the company?
They don't necessarily have to have strong feelings about the community, but if you annoy the 9 + 1% of content creators (curators, submitters, whatever), there's nothing left for the 90% to do, and they'll move on to the next big thing out of a lack of interest.
The people who are complaining the loudest about the site's failures aren't members of the 90% of lurkers - they're members of the 9% of occasional contributors or the 1% of prolific contributors. And they're the ones that will make or break the site, so blowing them off as "not the majority" seems like a really awful idea.
I guess I was thinking of a site that the of entirety (or nearly all of) the 10/101ths of Reddit users which make up the theoretical strong feelers would move to.
As in order to attract most of them a single site would need to both be able to handle the traffic and have a broad appeal across subjects. Maintaining such a site with that much headroom for users with only their current user base to generate ad revenue I assume is problematic and I would be surprised if any single site currently could handle a mass migration like that (except maybe Tumblr which I have my doubts would appeal to this portion of the Reddit population).
So while a mass exodus could take place people would likely scatter to different sites, which might not make any single other site 'it' enough to attract the remaining masses. Or the exodus takes place over time, which I consider the likely situation, having seen the effective death of many internet communities prior to the beast which is Reddit.
If they leave over time Reddit doesn't need to ask what it should do when the 10 leaves, it needs to ask what it should do when the 10 starts to leave.( my guess would be they need to get them to stop leaving, or get others to step up and take their place as people that feel strongly about the site in its then state, or buy the site they are leaving to).
SA and Fark were both pretty big internet communities back in the prime of Slashdot. In that I remember there were quite a few friendly (and less than friendly) rivalries going between the three.
I would say any regular visitor is part of the community. There is no requirement to give back to a community in order to be a member. It is just a group of people who share a connection due to common interests or objectives.
As such, it was entirely justified.
You don't seem to understand how this works. Reddit does not own the community. Reddit hosts the community, and in return the community provides content for Reddit.
The community has already moved from another provider, and if Reddit carries on with more management idiocy, it will move again.
Social is littered with the crumbling ruins of corps that believed they were too big to fail, but which fell off the world after Doing Stupid Shit for too long.