[missingcolours]

The king can always order the protestors killed, but he prefers not to because of the potentially destabilizing second-order effects. Similar with reddit -they can, and maybe they will at some point, but... will the new mods be similarly difficult, embarrassing them and compounding the problem? Will the new mods be less competent or have new and different ideological vendettas, causing other problems? etc. Easier to just wait for them to back down for now, particularly since reddit basically holds all the cards.