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Am I missing something - all reddit has to do is one code change to prevent subreddits from getting private or closed.

Feels like a bunch of people are completely misreading their self-presumed social status and leverage. The content is what drives traffic and revenue, not their fungible volunteer labor.

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Reddit forcing open the subreddits would result in massive backlash from moderators, who are often the main people providing content and enforcing content quality. It would crank the degree to which Reddit is tarnishing its reputation to 11.

A very small portion of users are responsible for the majority of the content and community building on Reddit. I think you might be underestimating how reliant the 99% of users who don’t post top-level content or serve as moderators are on the 1% who do.

Maybe. I'm not sure though. Reddit has an organic way to grow it's user engagement. It didn't start out with all of these mods. The general mood/experience on reddit today is much chiller. A lot of the people susceptible to feelings of indignation are gone. I think it's very possible new mods / content contributors will grow organically, conforming to whatever in house tools reddit creates. But who knows, maybe it will go the way of digg.

That would make some communities public that had nothing to do with this protest

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