And all they had to do was completely destroy the site and make every community on it unusable

And they only needed 2000 employees to do that.

What about their trusty slaves modding for a sense of belonging, pride and accomplishment?

many of these supposed "slaves" are making $100k+ a year with affiliate links in sidebars and crap like that,

especially for gambling and illegal/unregulated gambling related stuff

eg @ /r/sportsbook /r/gambling /r/casino /r/<insert casino brand here> etc etc

because of course audience + parasite hosting (google likes to rank reddit for lots of queries)

Maybe some small minority of mods make money, and Reddit turns a blind eye.

But it's certainly not the majority, and the further back in time you go, the number gets significantly lower.

I'm still coming to terms with the fact that the internet has changed. The people who do it for money completely outcompete those who do it for passion.

For the moment, anyway. Looks pretty toxic to me, but who knows.

I still hate reddit for ending its free API access.