This touches an issue I'd like to elaborate on: the psychology of someone who is willing to moderate a Reddit subsection—or any similar site, like many mailing lists—is probably not good. It takes someone willing to spend a fair amount of time at a thankless task that is hard to do well and rarely if ever remunerative.

A lot of the people who start at that task do so optimistically but quit as their lives change or the task becomes more onerous. Who gets left? People with axes to grind; people with no sense of perspective; petty tyrants; and so on. I don't use Reddit much for many reasons, but one is the low quality of moderators. I don't bother messaging them anymore, ever, because doing so is largely a waste of time.

The problem with moderators is not dissimilar from the problem of users: people who regularly have something interesting to say and the means to say it well get blogs, as I wrote here: http://jseliger.wordpress.com/2013/06/05/social-news-sites-a... . Those who don't stay on Reddit.