Excuse me, my esteemed aerial cephalopod, but I don’t see a doctor in front of your name. Those sodas didn’t end up hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt getting their doctorates to be dissed by you.
At this point it seems likely that Reddit is so incompetent, they just ran a script to check if a subreddit was private and extort the mods if it was, without any check on how long the sub had been private.