I believe it was the opposite, people got outraged because they got the exact meaning of the joke.

People were expressing loud and clear their grievances and one admin response was in the lines of "we know about it, let's do nothing and watch the drama unfold, it will die down".

And, to be fair, it did die down. Even though there's still some aftershocks to the initial revolution, reddit seems to be mostly back to normal now.

Except, you know, Reddit moderators having editorials run in the New York Times.

That's a fair point, but if you read the article, it reads like a post-mortem: "this is what happened, this is why it sucked, life goes on, let's try to not do this again."

Maybe competing websites (Voat in particular) got a bump because of what happened, but at the end of the day redditors aren't an activist crowd (or rather, they are a slacktivist crowd.) I doubt this will have any big consequences.

And reddit alternatives growing like crazy.

The way I took this statement was roughly "I will enjoy watching this drama unfold, but I won't do anything other than watch". Is that inaccurate?

I just saw it as someone throwing out a joke in the middle of handling a stressful situation. Reading his retrospective post on the matter, it sounds like he'd been trying to understand and address the situation all day and hadn't realized that the userbase at large didn't know that.

Given that most of the popular subreddits were offline for the day, I can't imagine anyone would seriously think they didn't care at all. Failing to address that situation would have been a great way to kill the site entirely.

By that description, I think everyone understood the sentiment exactly.

If he demands to be the front-and-center face of reddit, he should act like it.