Additional additional context: The absentee head mod (legweed) returned a week before the protests and made a thread for all the mods of the sub to discuss whether to do a blackout. Basically nobody else meaningfully interacted except for the a single mod who was vehemently against it (CedarWolf), the same mod that was promoted by the admins.

The users of the sub overwhelmingly supported the blackout, but CedarWolf was involved in mass comment/post removals and bannings of pro-blackout content in the leadup. This included mod convo posts literally saying the community can't make the decision for themselves and that they (CedarWolf) know what's best for the community. At the same time legweed was trying to get other mods opinions but nobody actually responded until legweed make a stickied post to engage the community. This upset CedarWolf as he'd been spending most of his time suppressing those same conversations from happening.

I'm not saying an absentee mod should be able to show up an unilaterally private a sub, but in this case they were showing up to engage the community and the community was the one who asked to have it privated. None of the other mods really cared enough to argue, the one anti-blackout person was basically alone in their opinion and is equally responsible for a unilateral decision, except that one went against the community wishes.

Sure legweed was an absentee head mod, but CedarWolf wasn't just active, he's terminally online and has a really nasty superiority complex. I don't think either is really head mod material but one sided with the admins and now they have the unilateral control they had already tried to exercise prior.

Source/Context:

https://old.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/147eaw3/rsubredditdrama_is_in_restricted_mode_for_the/jo0eoqw/

https://imgur.com/ChkGJG3