Reddit's already dead. There is no more growth to be had. Reddit's about group social construction. Not about objectivity or truthyness, but about constructing and constant negotiation of norms. You construct your own Reddit, groups construct themselves. A varied Redditness emerges through spilling between groups.<p>Groups face tipping points and runaway effects, especially when agency, or perception of agency, is stripped. Reddit imposed moderators will in many cases lack sufficient objective knowledge to operate niches and pander to remaining niche subject experts with varying results, while in all cases seek to impose an objective, uniform with permissible variation, normative imagination of Redditness, one they themselves lack the agency, sufficient potential to constantly generate chaos, to change.<p>The only value in Reddit now is a rundown of selling to the community, I pull 4 years from a magical had, selling the communities, then strip asset the intellectual property they claim. Any investor would be mad to think of Reddit as anything but a distressed asset investment.
<i>Reddit cannot survive without its moderators.</i><p>I think it can <i>survive</i>. Turn a profit? Probably not. It would have to hire on a massive centralized moderator team and operate much like Facebook with the key difference being all those moderators would have to <i>hit the ground running</i> on an already massive site <i>vs the organic growth of FB</i>. It would be very bumpy and risk causing even more turmoil. They would be applying very generalized moderation rules to all subreddits and I suspect that would drive even more people away. But that is my opinion from an outsiders point of view as I have never had a Reddit account and only moderated small forums <i>by today's standards</i>.
I expect 80% of moderations to be simply superfluous. Sure you need some moderations for spam and obvious trolls. But I very much expect reddit mods are spending most of their time removing comments they personally don't like. Seeing first hand how many valid but going against the grain comments get removed.