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Subreddits are literally controlled by volunteers who get paid nothing. What is stopping them from just going out for a month? It ought to be a month of vacation time, right?

You could argue they might lose users, but who cares, Reddit suffers more from loss of users than them anyway.

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Addiction and the fear that reddit staff will just appoint new mods, like they've done before.

Also, the mods don't do it for free at all. They get paid to promote content.

All the primary mods on the big subs also have online social media marketing consultancies.

Most do it for free. Powermods often are getting paid to promote stuff.

Reddit can replace the mods at any time, if necessary with their own staff until they get volunteers.

That only works for the top few dozen subreddits, the ones that were once 'default' subreddits, they can't afford to pay people to sit and moderate the other hundred thousand subreddits all day long.

They probably don't care about that long tail. While valuable to individual users, I'm sure their business is an 80-20 like any other. For monetization, they just need to make sure the default subreddits stay moderated. Which they can with hired guns if required. This is how every other social network works after all.

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