Replacing mods for a moderately sized subreddit? Sure, that’s do-able. It’s been done with a thread in which volunteers are “interviewed” and selected.

Replacing mods for a large subreddit? That’s going to be tougher, the transition might be rocky, and backup choices will need promotion when many of the inexperienced volunteers who got the job didn’t know what they signed up for. But they’d rather tolerate an interim rough period than an extended loss of the community.

Replacing mods in thousands of subreddits? And I just counted about 300 dark subreddits with 1M+ users at reddark so it’s not like these are all niche nsfw interests that investors will happily shed.

And what will do they do when users want to vote out the NEW mods like they voted out the old ones? Or when the inevitable allegations of rigging the voting that reddit controls happen?

Plus, media outlets are starting to trip over themselves to publish how bad reddit is making themselves look. They better believe that bad actors are organizing attempts to take these over and buying accounts with post / comment histories in the communities they want, too.

When this is all said and done, the quality of reddit content is going to stay substantially below where it was a week ago. Spez might be happy to have people handing over user data and ad views again, but his investors will not soon forget how vulnerable this platform is to its volunteer workforce as an investment risk.

Reddit won’t die, it’ll just be dumber as it completes its speed run to becoming a user data farm, like more traditional social media such as Facebook. I don’t mind clicking Twitter links for journalist releases or sports highlights and I won’t mind clicking reddit for its immense value as a reference in hobbies. But of all the transformations I’ve seen reddit undergo, this one takes the cake and it’s not even close.