There's plenty of mods from subreddits that didn't go dark and have 20m+, reddit can just put them in charge.
I highly doubt the specific mods matter that much on these "fluff" subreddits. Subreddits like r/apple I could see it mattering a lot more, but most of the top ones aren't exactly complex topics.
There is a social contract and moderator effort to make that happen. When that contract is broken and moderators are stretched thin, how long is that subreddit still going to be just cute animals?
And I completely agree with you on 95%+ of subs.
But I think there's enough active, and willing mods who already manage several large subreddits (10m+) capable of managing the half a dozen or so subs that I mentioned.
And I'm only talking about 6 subs, not even 10's of subs.
I just don't think theres enough ambiguity/complexity with moderating those in regards to choosing what content is or isn't appropriate for that sub.
But either way I truly hope we can get old reddit back, api, third party clients, and all :(
It’s the long tail of niche subreddits where almost all the content that keeps Reddit at the top of SEO rankings and makes them interesting for training AI lives.
“Fact: there is NO DEFENSE against the digital ghillie suit!”
Even in subs where people are very passionate about moderation, they just give up and forget about it very quickly because it's not worth it. r/Animemes/ still has orders of magnitude more visitors than the alternative people moved to after their big mod drama.
Extremely few people interacts with mods and care about them