It's really kind of crazy to see. I just checked some of my favorite subs and out of 22 subs I checked, 20 are currently private.

I've seen some people claim that it's just the "powermods" pushing for these blackouts, but that's not my experience at all. Several medium-size subs I frequent (none of them moderated by powermods) made polls and the result was always the same: an overwhelming majority (like 90%+) of users were in favor of shutting down the subreddit.

I really hope Reddit can be saved. It'd be a shame to lose it like this.