Surely, Reddit would just remove and replace these moderators at the first taste of real pain. Yes?

I don't think they'd have enough replacements ready quick enough. They'd have to decide between an influx of spam from having no moderation and upset users, massive disruption from upset disruptive moderators, or stale content by freezing all submissions to the site.

If I were in their position, I would have trained for this scenario, and already prepared a way to put entire subreddits into 'read only' mode which just replays history - ie. show funny cat pictures from last year. Then any subreddit that starts talking too much about leaving for a new platform gets put in read only mode. Let people think they are still interacting - ie. people can still upvote/downvote/comment, but it's mostly/all dummy stuff.

But... I bet they haven't prepared, and will be caught off guard.

>I don't think they'd have enough replacements ready quick enough.

There is never a shortage of losers desperate for a crumb of power.

Sure, there would be no shortage of applicants, and they'd all largely fall foul of the Douglas Adams rule about those who seek power. But they need not just people who'd put their hand up and do the moderation, but wouldn't drive all the users away (whether immediately or long term), which would be the hard part.

The last time subreddits staged a coordinated strike like this, Reddit warned they would replace moderators next time. I wonder if they'll make good on their threat? I wish they would, the powermod situation on reddit is out of control. Part of the reason these coordinated strikes happen is because most top subreddits are ran by the same handful of people. It would do reddit some good to get variety among the moderators.

Removing some moderators would probably anger other moderators...

And those can be replaced with what has to be an infinite pool of people willing to volunteer as thought-police for a public company.

But will the users stay if they do that? I'm not convinced I would.

Users don't care about the moderators. Users care about the content.

Most people hate the mods. "Mods are gay" is a common refrain on reddit. The mods are the killjoys that removed your post that didn't conform to their hyper specific subreddit rules, or locked a fun post before you got there.

Mods aren't leaders, they're hall monitors.

I reckon most people wouldn't care, they aren't there for the mods. Others, although far fewer, would celebrate due to the power mod situation mentioned above. /r/all is just awful nowadays so it might be an improvement.

I can vouch that it is not infinite. You couldn't pay me to do that shitty job.

A lot of the depends on if you think the moderator role is truly impactful in a meritocratic way where better work is rewarded with higher quality communities and content V.S. a largely rote role which involves correctly implementing the community rule set.

If the former is true, the moderators aren't really "replaceable" in that way. You can fire them, but the output of your product will suffer as a result. In that interpretation the moderators are actually some of the most important customers of Reddit - they produce quality content in return for free hosting and occasional assistance.

If the latter is true then you can just fire them and it doesn't matter...but it kind of seems like no one believes that? If Reddit really thought they could fire them they probably would have just done it? I don't know what the truth is but I think the former interpretation dominates thinking.

“ If the former is true, the moderators aren't really "replaceable" in that way. You can fire them, but the output of your product will suffer as a result”

Sure - the cost would be higher, but is that cost actually higher than allowing insurgent moderators to retain control over very prominent subreddits and, presumably, shut them down? Doubtful. There’s no way Reddit would allow moderators to “take down” Reddit.

I mean, I think there have been plenty of examples of new moderation teams being able to kill popular subreddits. So I do think there's a good chance that the option is illusory. The subreddit will die if you piss off all of the moderators at the same time and it kind of doesn't matter if it's through a protest you won't listen to or by firing them.

Facebook, Instagram, etc. have shown that users are willing to put up with an absurd amount of bullshit and bad apps. While Reddit may lose the crowd who are aware of this whole issue, those users are likely the tip of an iceberg of "I just want to see ~~titties~~ kitties."

Reddit isn't a cozy corner of internet subculture anymore. It was instrumental in getting the orange buffoon elected, for crying out loud.

People use those things because of people they know in the real world, reddit isn't like that.

also I dare say it was more 4chan than reddit who got trump elected

Rubbish. It was Twitter.

cnn is probably the biggest factor

IMO the powermods are one of the main problems of reddit.

>These moderators could, if they organised together, kill the site in a matter of days.

That's not quite true. Reddit has the power in this relationship. See for example what happened when /r/NoahGetTheBoat tried to rebel

https://old.reddit.com/r/NoahGetTheBoat/comments/13c9fx4/rem...

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   For all those reporting this, it isn’t coming down. If it makes you uncomfortable and you’re in the US, this is part of US “gun culture.” Work to change it.

   Edit: Good lord people, yes I can see that the post was removed by Reddit. We can’t influence Reddit admin actions, but we’ve reached out for clarification on the removal.
   
   Edit2: Reddit has clarified the removal, and it will not be rescinded. Not much else to see here.