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.
Can they really be replaced, though? There aren’t an infinite number of people willing to do shitty internet janitorial work for free. You generally get two types of people to fill that role, those who are passionate about the subject and those who like having control.
The passionate ones are rare and special, they make a community good. They’ll go away. The power-hungry ones might stick around. But they’ll make the subs worse, and they’re now serving at the whim of Reddit so they might not be so happy with that kind of “power” either. They could have so much more power - the power of the
godsadmins themselves - if they were to run their own instance on the Fediverse.Reddit may find enough scabs to keep the lights on, but if this was really a cost-free solution to Reddit’s problem they would have done it ages ago.
They can throw money at it until it works out. Mods do good things, but the bulk of the work is relatively mindless, and easy to outsource.
Money is the whole reason they’re doing any of this, though. The more money this debacle costs them the worse it is for them. They just laid off 5% of their staff, and now they’re going to have to hire paid moderators?
They might have to contract some janitors temporarily.
They can afford it. It will keep things running smoothly until volunteer mods are sourced.
Also, the reason they are shutting down third party apps is control. Bottom line is money, but indirectly. They want everyone using their app or their web interface so they can harvest the most data and sell the best ads.
My guess is, that they‘ll wait as long as possible to pay mods. This would set a precedent for the whole platform.