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I could be wrong, but IMO, it most likely comes down to the fact that the admins happen to be human beings and these particular communities are just starting to grate on their nerves. Pages and pages of highly upvoted direct attacks rattled the CEO to the point where he thought it wasn't a completely insane idea to abuse his developer privileges to silently alter user content in an attempt to troll his critics. That is a pretty telling sign of frustration.

Whenever the admins make any changes, a certain sub-section of the site goes completely insane and spams the site with tons of threads about how the site is fucking terrible and how the admins are fucking idiots with the common thread among these rabblerousers being that they always happen to hate a particular group that is ruining the site and destroying the indomitable reddit free speech ethos.