Closed: "Forever Alone" thread on Reddit

The title caught my eye (Living with "Forever Alone" Syndrome), so I started reading from the very first post.

This thread is dedicated to all those lonely wolves out there who just don't have the energy to make a big deal out of being single anymore—or more specifically, to anyone who has decided to stop swimming against the current, stop fighting an uphill battle, and just accept their "forever alone" status as a permanent fixture for the rest of their lives.
http://www.example-us-forum.com/showthread.php?t=818186

etc.
The original poster (unloved28) actually set the stage quite well and laid out her reasoning. A discussion starts, the thread grows—it hits five pages...
By the last page, someone manages to provoke the OP (or maybe she just let them get under her skin, I guess) and she responds like this:

I’m not planning on saying anything else, given the malicious provocations that have started popping up here.
Bye.
http://www.example-us-forum.com/showpost.php?p=4...1&postcount=97

...to which the moderator (Matthew Anderson) delivers the final word:

In that case, there’s no need for this thread to exist.
http://www.example-us-forum.com/showpost.php?p=4...&postcount=100

Locked & closed.

The thread was started on March 8th, and it was dead and buried just four days later. 😢

I suspect the moderator might not have considered that the OP wrote her final post in the heat of the moment—out of pure frustration. Maybe—and this is just a thought—after a good night's sleep or a little bit of reflection, she would have jumped back into her own discussion.
Just like everyone else would have kept posting—but now they can't, because it's shut down.

Doesn't every one of us get annoyed when, say, a site goes down due to some server error (like a 503 or 504 error) and after trying to load it a few times, we think:
'Ugh, forget this, I'm never visiting this site again!' Or: 'Fine, I'll come back once they actually fix the servers!' And then... we're right back there...

If there hadn't been any interest in the topic, it probably would have just sunk to the bottom of the forum on its own after a while anyway.

The question is—can a mod make a mistake too? Like, acting too hastily or reacting a bit too reflexively by just shutting the whole thing down...?

Jose Edwards16 said:The real question is—can a moderator mess up too? Like, overreact or jump the gun by closing a thread prematurely?

Of course they can. But in this specific instance, I don't think it's an error. The OP didn't actually want to answer the questions being asked; she just decided that since she didn't like them, they must be provocations.

Since a thread like this can't really sustain itself without active participation from the person who started it, there’s no point in leaving it open. If she had stepped up and asked me to reopen it, I would have. Since she hasn't, the thread stays locked.

p.s. This topic belongs on the US subforum, and honestly, the title is pretty weak.

p.p.s. Generally speaking, starting a thread just to hunt for people who already agree with you is a bit of a dead end.

^
I’m pretty happy—and actually satisfied😁—with how you handled this. You weren't being one-sided or dismissive, which means the thread can probably be unblocked
if there's some solid reasoning behind it (especially since the original poster asked for it). So, I guess we're good here.