In a comment shared by r/Apple moderator @aaronp613, Reddit cited its Moderator Code of Conduct and said that it has a duty to keep communities “relied upon by thousands or even millions of users” operational. Mods who do not agree to reopen subreddits that have gone private will be removed.
If a moderator team unanimously decides to stop moderating, we will invite new, active moderators to keep these spaces open and accessible to users. If there is no consensus, but at least one mod wants to keep the community going, we will respect their decisions and remove those who no longer want to moderate from the mod team.
Reddit doesn’t pay them anything, doesn’t even offer premium at a discount or anything.
But it offers them a tiny bit of power, via being a internet janitor. I’m certain that there’s a decent amount of people who will jump at the opportunity to become a moderator of a large subreddit. They are obviously the worst people to wield such power - just like anyone in the real world who seeks power is least likely to use it for good.
Moderation will be low quality, but it will remove spam. As long as the content mill keeps running all is fine. Users of the tiktokified official Reddit app won’t even notice a thing.
