And that's the point where I usually say, "Feel free to unsubscribe."

Have done. Good riddance. Here's the part you're missing: you're overseeing a subreddit ostensibly dedicated to sharing images, but your core mission is actually "censor images." Your core skills are "talk about images" and "classify images" and your highest-ranking images are generally not OC.

Because Corbis or Getty aren't half the dicks you are.

/r/EarthPorn will have 200,000 subscribers very soon

And /r/DoesAnybodyElse will have 160,000, despite the fact that their charter is essentially "kill the subreddit." In other words, your "growth" is only marginally better than a group of people dedicated to killing growth.

And here's the amazing thing. Flickr is dead. Instagram is masturbatory lo-fi. Deviantart is teen sketches of Manga. Yet somehow you've managed to keep the SFWPorn network from becoming THE imaging community for the Internet even as /r/IAmA lands Obama. Do you think they have any less of an iron fist than you do? I don't.

I think they're less arbitrary.

So keep patting yourself on the back. But when your goalposts are "we've had less explosive growth than Reddit as a whole" I think you need to recognize that even grading on the curve, you're falling far short of success.

The ones that don't, well... they left.

exactly.