Their whole business model is that you have free labor to moderate the subs. They can't afford to pay for all subs and will become centralized in a few subs only.

As the front page of the Internet, I would hope someone there has enough imagination to find a way to pay the people that do the work. If not, do we really have an Internet?

Front page of the internet? Please. It's not that important.

They were referencing reddit's slogan, although I don't know if they still use it anywhere.

It's in some of the older CSS still, last I checked.

It's the <title> on old.reddit.com still.

Yeah, that's right up there with "Free, and always will be", except there's different costs not covered by that free.

Do you think it's possible to pay a new group of people and have them care as much as the people who met voluntarily out of sheer interest and dedication to their community? I doubt it.

Edit: not that I'm against paying mods, I support that. But replacing enthusiast mods with paid mods, I doubt that'll be adequate.

The obvious example here is /r/AskHistorians. Notoriously among the strictest subreddits, and an absolute treasure to read as a result. There is zero chance it could be maintained by paid staff without a serious search for qualified people.

There's a bit in Predictably Irrational by Daniel Ariely where he talks about social compensation vs. market compensation (I could be remembering the terms wrong). He asks how poorly it would go if you went to Thanksgiving dinner with your grandmother, and after eating the amazing spread you handed her a $20 and said, "That's for the great food, gran, it was amazing!"

Is replacing free labour with paid labour really the best direction for the IPO balance sheet?

If I consider it from the perspective of reddit inc, probably. Get some cheap labor where I can pay as little per hour as possible, and get rid of people who can strike without losing anything. The people I'll hire for cheap won't strike because I do unlikable changes like pushing out 3rd party apps or try to get rid of NSFW content. And if they do, I'll just fire them and replace with someone else.

Gets rid of a nuisance relatively easy, but degrades the quality. But reddit doesn't seem to care much about quality for the last years so.

Maybe Reddit has decided the free labor costs too much, even if the price is cheap.