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I find it hilarious that the ones who do all the real work to make Reddit what it is, ie the mods and the communities, make zilch from this. The mods are doing their best to make their subreddits the best it can be, for free. Meanwhile the engineers and the execs and investors at Reddit make billions.

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Mods get a lot from moderation other than money, maybe money too in some cases. If it was truly without any returns, nobody would do it. They have disproportionate power to ban anyone immediately. They can strut around with their pinned posts, "warnings" to the communities, content deletion. They get to play the community lead despite having unknown credentials for it. Because of that, the quality of moderation is very low, unbalanced, and disproportionate. I think Reddit's moderation structure is cost efficient but suffers from quality and consistency.

Is there even a viable way to compensate mods financially? It seems like it'd be far too expensive, excepting a few major subreddits, which doesn't even get into other issues. You'd have to eventually evaluate and manage mods, which is difficult since the evaluators would have to be good enough subject matter experts to evaluate a mod, then you'd have the problem of communities getting split because they don't like the "man" policing them, even if they are doing a good job. There are also so many subreddits already that look like tribal echo chambers utilizing a "you're either with us or against us" frame of mind that you'd just have to shut them down.

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