It may not be a, in denial, hiding their heads in the sand situation.

Sometimes a topic gets too popular, it drowns out all the other topics. At that point, aren't they just a glorified version of r/llm?

I'll give you one personal example:

The year Caitlin Clark was drafted to the wnba.

r/wnba went from a subreddit of 9000, to eventually 200k subs.

We were bombarded with CC posts every hour.

- Some of it was trolls staging a race war (this was during US elections).

- Some of it was genuine CC fans, who wanted to talk about CC.

- Some of it was bball nerds, who you know... wanted to talk about a bball player in a bball forum (regardless of who that bball player happens to be).

So what happened was, at any given day, 80% of the front page was CC content.

At that point, we might as well have been r/caitlinclark.

So the mods did something drastic and controversial. They banned all "low effort" CC content.

WTF does "low effort" mean? It pretty much meant 99% of CC posts got removed.

The forum went back to something that resembled a bball forum. That talked about other players. And other teams. Not just Caitlin Clark.