Yeah see here's the thing about that analogy.

Let's say you're King Spez. Your Conquistadors have established Novo Espana and the land is free for the taking. So you give out grants to anyone willing to make the journey.

Once they get there, they have fuckall. They have no military backing. Raiders can murder them, burn their crops, run off with their women. Maybe they can sell excess grain? Maybe they can't. Maybe they can get others to show up and till the land with them? Maybe they can't. Maybe they impose some order? Maybe they don't. Maybe they thrive? Maybe they can't. Maybe they steadily, through unremunerated effort, build up the value of the new land to the point where it makes King Spez rich and powerful -

- and then he calls you 'aristocracy' and takes it from you.

See, there are two ways to do this. Within market economies, the value developed in a land grant becomes the property of the landholder and should the land grant be revoked, the landholder is entitled to fair market value. Within command economies, the landholder is always the king, whose vassals work it under penalty of exile or death.

Market economies run the world now because they incentivize the labor and ingenuity of those who develop resources. Command economies are perpetually laggard because when you imprison the kulaks and drive them off their land you end up with a bunch of schlubs who don't give a shit about the revolution in charge of feeding it.

The only thing that makes a subreddit worth anything is its moderation, and the quickest way to get banned from Reddit is to attempt to gain remuneration from your labor. The security and sanctity of the title is the only thing the moderator class has going for it, and Spez has just decided "yeah fuck off you don't even get that."

Which basically belies their whole deeply libertarian bent - I mean, Reddit basically exists so Alexis and Steve could pimp Ron Paul and then it accidentally became a social network on the side. But the move they're making now is about as Soviet as it gets.

I haven't been over there in years because I have had this discussion, with Alexis, with Steve, with a half-dozen people there. They don't fucking get it because they don't want to get it. They want to do what they want to do because ultimately it's their site and fuck you for thinking otherwise.