My experience with YouTube has taught me about this, my son had one account banned - even though he proved it was hacked and had 4 videos uploaded to it whilst we were away (and offline) which were 1. easily identified as spam and 2. Deleted on his return.

Basically, without more human interaction, you're taking away a safety razor and giving a robot a cut throat razor.

That means that users will be less able to just say what they think, and live in fear of being banned for typing a wrong word somewhere.

My experience (not being a cringingly polite person - I don't suffer fools gladly) with Yahoo Answers, Quora in the old days, and other platforms has backed this up. When communities become much larger, then there need to be more human moderators to keep up with posts being flagged by users, or bots, or whatever.

I'm slightly curious to see whether the future will see more AI moderation, but I can't see that being a good solution for a few years yet.

Don't be shocked if reddit itself secretly replaces a mod with a staff member or more likely intern for the large subreddits. They want their advertising money.

This is something I just commented on somewhere else, I'll paste it here:

I don't believe they're really concerned with replacing the mods right now. I think what they care about is the number of times people are coming from search results and seeing that the subreddit is now private instead of what the search was for. They also probably want to get ahead of it fast because Google's gonna stop pointing to them for results that don't exist anymore. That's why getting the sub public but locked is what they're doing instead of replacing the mods with interim mods and keeping the content coming.

Money is #1 for them, spez has his investors breathing down his neck, and he's so burnt out on being involved that his PR is absolute crap but of course he won't leave without the payout he's worked so hard for. If you look at it from that perspective it all makes sense, at least for someone who only cares about money.

I suspect they think a Modbot can replace human mods. I doubt it so the job probably gets outsourced to underpaid workers. I dont think any new volunteers will hang around long if faced with an angry community.

Yes, they apparently are going to remove me from the private subreddit I had set up a few years back for bot testing.

They're a joke.

People who DGAF about community but care a lot about promoting their agenda and don't mind putting up with extra extra bullshit to make sure their side gets a little extra weight on the scale. The harder it is to contribute the more you get people who have a particular reason to make the effort. Some people thought it was bad before but we've seen nothing yet.

People willing to cross the picket line.

Probably a building of overseas people making 50 cents an hour.

There's a subreddit r/redditrequest where users can request to be a mod of an unmoderated community. Although reddit might hand pick some consistent posters for the larger subs.

Underpaid workers , free mods ( slaves ) which are even happy to do it . Super mods. reddit admins.

Most likely if enough free mods leave and not enough rejoin some outsourcing center likely from a cheat country.