> If Reddit replaces volunteer mods with paid mods we would get a more > consistent moderation and almost certainly a more professional experience.

I can guarantee you the opposite. You'll have a site-wide abusable Scunthorpe-incompatible report-based automated moderation with no proper appeal mechanism in place because half a dozen underpaid interns/offshored employees will be responsible for taking over the work of hundreds of moderators.

It's already happening in some cases. There's ways to make reports go directly to the so-called Anti-Evil Operations team who will irrevocably override any moderation decision and enforce abusive reports.

It's easy to get people banned, post some hateful content, wait for reports, and then report the reports for report abuse.

> But I can't think of any other social site that has such a bad rep for moderation.

There are some legitimate cases of poorly moderated subreddits and mod abuse (and the whole powermod issue), but beware, most of the time people complaining about power-tripping mods and "not being able to say anything anymore" have been banned for very good reasons (those reasons being straight-up hate speech most of the time).