Allowing users to create forums about anything they can think of has led to some of the most wonderful niche communities on the internet. Allowing them to (mostly) self-govern has exempted Reddit from many of the impossible decisions faced by the social-media CEOs who took a more top-down approach to moderation. And while we may look back on it as a zero-interest rate phenomenon, Reddit’s free API accelerated the development of its app ecosystem, allowing users to create complementary tools and experiences that increased the service’s overall value.  It’s little wonder that, having long granted users so much power, Reddit now finds itself in crisis over a clumsy move to wrest it back. Let this be a lesson to anyone else who ever builds a social network: tell your users that the community belongs to them for long enough, and at some point they’ll start to believe you.