A lot of their messaging to advertisers revolves around discussing the value proposition of subs like /r/buyitforlife which has 1.5 million users who are likely actively considering a purchase at the moment of viewership, are willing to be convinced to spend more money, and are relatively affluent. Klaje (Reddit’s rev executive) loves talking about trust and positivity of the user base. I’m not sure how that messaging survives if the site moves away from quality content.
But now their serious competition is 9gag not quora or some other site. Most of my regular friends started using Reddit not just for the memes but the text based ones (like AITA, BORU) and local subs. Good luck making them look good with a large fraction of creators and good mods leaving.
I don't understand why people talk about the current mods as "good." They were literally chosen the same way future mods would be chosen, by volunteerism. There is no reason to believe future mods would be any less good than current mods. And I should amend my previous statement, text based subs that generate drama also generate ad impressions, ie AITA or BORU. I'm talking about how Reddit is moving away from niche text based communities since those do not generate nearly the same amount of ad impressions.
Maybe they can replace mods with new volunteers, but Reddit Admins have also just explicitly shown that mods with valid complaints will get no support, may be libeled, and potentially have an admin-led coup done against them if they don't comply.
This is likely to dissuade folks who are in it for the right reasons and want to do a good job with good tooling and proper care and power hungry weirdos who now know that if they disagree with the Admins, the Admins have shown they can weather any storm and don't care if any user, even powerful mods, disagree with them.
I'm not sure why anyone would decide to be a mod at this point. Before this month, it was a chance to run your own corner of the internet, for better or worse. Now it's been made very clear who actually runs the show, and that those people could not care any less about you.
No, the current mods were picked by 15 years of natural selection, where mods that don't care about their role have had the potential to get bored and leave or have their community migrate to a different subreddit that more matches what that community wants.
Antagonizing a large swathe of your volunteer-base of active mods all at once and then replacing them with new mods who seem fine with that antagonistic behavior is not going to select for the same group of people.
This is what drives the most eyeballs to ads though. Reddit simply wants to be like Instagram with memes, not an actual text-based discussion forum.