I wouldn't be surprised if the ban was a pretext and the sub was just something admins found objectionable for their own reasons. Like as long as mods remove material and users when an issue is brought to their attention then the sub should be fine.
The fact they don't know why it happened is telling that they weren't given a real chance to correct the issue. Just centralised social media things I guess.
I feel like the real reason would be that Reddit suits know that Reddit is stereotyped as a gooner website and don't want people to think redditors are gooners, which is very wishful thinking as everyone already knows they are some of the biggest gooners out there online.
I believe the admins do get paid. It's the mods that were fucked over here that don't get paid. I was really talking about your one's overall contribution to humanity.
EDIT: I didn't like how personal this sounded, it wasn't meant to.
Reddit is notorious to responding to financial incentives. In the past they would ban communities only when they became toxic to advertisers due to overwhelming negative publicity. During those purges, they would often throw in some leftist subs to prevent the user-base political average from shifting leftward, but the purges were never proactive.
I think we've entered a new era where Reddit is no longer as concerned about which subs may scare advertisers, and are more concerned about which subs generate the kind of content that is valuable to LLM training. If I were training the next version of ChatGPT, I would be alarmed if a text prompt spontaneously invited me to masturbate with it, or prompts for images of a "battle station" resulted in walls of women having sex.
The article is about reddit banning a community for no real reason with no option for recourse. My issue was I thought that was kind of an over the top description.