Ex: I have a product, it costs me $1 to make. I want to sell it for $10, so there's a nice profit margin. People will balk because they think it's worth $8, or once I announce any pricing they will protest and try to talk it down. So I announce it'll cost $100. That's exorbitant! Rage rage anger anger etc, then I'm like... does $10 sound reasonable? Oh wow you came down 90% that's really good sure I won't complain about that you are so good to us.
I wonder if Reddit tried this before with e.g. the previous content crackdown; they wanted to crack down to the point where the site would become ready for IPO (mainly get rid of porn), but they knew they'd suddenly lose two thirds of their engagement. They went for small steps then; remove hate subreddits (surely you cannot object to removing racism?? Oh right free speech), then remove porn from r/all, then remove porn from the API / 3rd party apps, before it gets removed entirely.
Another comparison: Trump. Put a far-right nutjob in the forefront, have him come out with some really racist and offensive shit every day, so that the more moderate but mainstream right-wingers get to put in a little racism.
Another stupid comparison: the Sonic movie. They did the first design badly on purpose, because it made people talk about and meme the Sonic movie for weeks on end. Then they did a redemption by changing the design to what they intended in the first place.