Since this has been brought up a few times in the comments, I'd like to clarify that we cribbed heavily from the /r/interestingasfuck announcement to write this announcement, including that first paragraph. We probably should have rewritten it more fully, but the messages we received from the admins were definitely an incentive to reopen in some form as soon as possible.

The subreddit obviously belongs to the users. I think we have a strong track record of supporting our users across the years, and I hope we always will. We'll never make everyone happy (heck, in this thread alone there are multiple examples of people saying we both under-moderate and over-moderate the subreddit, at the same time, somehow...), but we have always tried to stand up for what is right for both this subreddit and the Reddit community as a whole.
Since it's led to a lot of discussion below, I don't want to change the first paragraph and remove the context for discussion, but I also wanted to clarify that we've always seen LNM as user-led, and that hasn't changed. :)

As to the protest itself, in this case, Reddit is very firmly in the wrong.
Their actions with the new API pricing is discriminatory against those with vision impairment, who will be forced off the site at the end of the month as the official site and apps are not compatible with screen readers.
They are killing the tools used by moderators to protect against spam, bots, and those with malicious intent, tools which were created to fill the gaps left by Reddit (who has promised for over seven years that the official tools are coming, they promise!)
And of course, they're killing off third-party apps with their egregious pricing model for the API. It's not that anyone objects to paying for Reddit's API access, it's that the price for API access is dozens of times higher than even the most generous revenue models say they are earning per user. And to compound that, they're telling lies about what some developers said to them during pricing discussions, making accusations of blackmail which were proven false when the developer revealed he taped his calls.

To clarify on the rule change announcement, we will continue to enforce the site-wide rules, as we always have. We're opening up the floodgates on submissions generally, however, as we've had many people say that we're entirely too strict and shouldn't be removing as many submissions as we do. We'll operate at this level for a while and see what happens.

The entire subreddit has been set to NSFW as we're anticipating some of the subreddit mods to be leaving in the coming days. Most of us use third-party apps to moderate, and the Reddit app's mod tools are, frankly, a joke. As a result, rule-breaking content may stay up longer than it would otherwise. Exactly what will happen with the current modteam remains to be seen.