Supposing that somehow “well run” means anything that anyone else agrees with, aren’t you sort of the poster child of “not well run”? During your tenure at reddit, for instance, r/piracy became almost entirely useless. Years of prime advice was nuked when you erased everything but the last 6 months of history. Rules, and also secret rules, were enacted that make it impossible to discuss anything important. Contributors were banned form the subreddit having already demonstrated their worth.
As it is now, if the MPAA and RIAA teamed up with the Spanish priests who burned the Mayan codices to run a piracy internet forum, they still wouldn’t do as shitty a job as r/piracy does. If you had any sort of integrity at all, wouldn’t you have shut down the forum years ago?
So you destroyed the village in order to save it? You did lose the subreddit anyway. Nothing could ever be discussed. Everyone self-censored even if you didn’t force the issue on them.
The admins did it. But instead of them doing it despite your efforts, you cooperated. Hell, even that might be forgivable if afterward you’d realized the mistake you made and owned up to it. Instead, you’re here defending it.
What great lessons have you learned, that the same or similar wouldn’t be repeated here? I mean, another person might have spent years struggling with and straining their brain to figure out how to make a forum that assholes like the reddit admins can’t nuke. No, your best is apparently waiting for someone else to come up with a possible solution, and then just migrating over to it until the copyright trolls catch up and start lobbing legal thermonukes in this direction. Then I guess you’ll cooperate again, and wait for yet another forum to be created somewhere else, only to repeat the pattern.