You don't own it, you were just either the first person to create the subreddit or someone who has since becomes the longest-serving moderator on it.
I'll never understand how camping on a subreddit gives anyone the right to say that they "own" it or gives them more power over everyone else indefinitely. It's a big flaw in Reddit, I think all subreddits should be put up for some kind of vote every ~2 years.
If you don’t like the way a subreddit is run then you can make another one, and if you are sufficiently better then people will switch. Reddit isn’t stack exchange. It’s more like running an open source project.
The problem is that there’s this hostile corporation that sometimes tries to kill their own product every few years overseeing everything.
That's much easier said than done - say you don't like the moderation or content of /r/gaming, how are you going to spread the word about your new subreddit? It won't have as good a name as /r/gaming, it's not a default sub so it's more difficult to find, and you might find that mentions of your subreddit make it onto a powermod blacklist, ensuring you can't even link to it from other subreddits.
How can Reddit have the concept of default subreddits yet allow them to be run by random, unvetted people? For me being default includes some kind of guarantee of quality and approval by Reddit, yet most of these default subreddits are going dark!
There’s also r/gamingnews.
I think that over time the concept of a default subreddit has been imbued with a significance that it didn't originally have. Basic UI design dictates that if someone shows up at the front page of your link aggregator website they should see some links, so they had to show some subreddits even before the user did anything. I don't think it was originally meant to imply any kind of guarantee or quality or approval by Reddit. But for various reasons, mostly to do with the huge growth in traffic to the Reddit front page (as well as some political meddling by the admins), that is now the impression a lot of people have.
Reddit hasn't had default subreddits for a few years. These days you're onboarded onto r/popular and then algorithmically recommended a few you can subscribe to.
And the US Government has never done anything similar? Heck, they don't even need to be punishing you to take your land, they can just have plans for a highway that will pass through where your house currently is.
There is no objective and constant set of universal rules for what defines ownership because it’s a made up concept
Unless you’ve ingested something to burn for calories, or destroyed something then nothing is strictly and forever yours to keep and dispose of as you please.
Your "ownership" of a subreddit amounts to a single row in a database on one of Reddit's servers, which they can change for any or no reason.
Moderators (and users in general) need a reality check about their relationship with the sites they frequent. You are not a part owner. You are not an employee. You are one of ~500M monthly users who they use to generate advertising revenue, and your loss will not be noticed.