In a comment shared by r/Apple moderator @aaronp613, Reddit cited its Moderator Code of Conduct and said that it has a duty to keep communities “relied upon by thousands or even millions of users” operational. Mods who do not agree to reopen subreddits that have gone private will be removed.
If a moderator team unanimously decides to stop moderating, we will invite new, active moderators to keep these spaces open and accessible to users. If there is no consensus, but at least one mod wants to keep the community going, we will respect their decisions and remove those who no longer want to moderate from the mod team.
Classic strikebusting. “Oh you won’t work for an increasingly bad shake? Guess I’ll put these scabs in place instead.”
What’s stopping the entire mod team from nuking the sub? They can remove all formatting, ban the entire userbase and remove all mod bots.
Rollback on to a backup probably
And then Reddit restores from backup.
and opens themselves to brigading.
At this point I wouldn’t be surprised if Reddit has put rate-limiting in place to prevent mass actions like that.
Normally I wouldn’t give their engineers enough credit to figure something like that out, but in this case rate-limiting already exists for posts, comments, chat, etc.