Wrong? No. But leadership is about communication and diplomacy as much as strategy. Short term gameplay aside, it doesn't take much effort to pretend to attempt to placate power users and it doesn't cost anything besides pride to do so. At least Reddit had a half-decent communication strategy with the Boston Bomber debacle - can't say the same with this one.

In any case, whilst you won't get the r/funny's of Reddit going private indefinitely, you do have some big ones like r/iphone saying they're blacking out immediately.

It's pretty myopic of the leadership team to think that you shouldn't at least attempt to make an user relations play here.