Clearly that can't be true. That subreddit is still valuable without AMAs. The people in charge just can't bring themselves to be honest with their users. Look at the re-opening announcement and spot the blatant lies and half-truths:

> Today /r/science was briefly shut down, and in the interest of transparency we would like to address the reason for this occurrence. Following consequential changes in admin organization and AMA execution, the capacity of /r/science to continue hosting AMAs was impacted. Admin support has been crucial to the /r/science AMA program, and unfortunately these recent changes had the consequence of limiting that support, impacting several AMAs. By changing the status of /r/science to private briefly, we hoped to enable both Admin and the moderation to team to focus their energies on resolving these issues in a timely manner. Though this situation is ongoing, we are returning /r/science to public status in order to limit the inconvenience to the community.

> The comments in this thread will be locked.

They also don't care to explain themselves to their users so they just blocked the comments. Father knows best.

dealing with rescheduling all future AMAs can suck up a lot of volunteer moderator time. Time that would otherwise have to be spent moderating the sub.

So yes, to do things effectively without half assing everything, i can see a reason to shut down the sub temporarily