And the moment they recognise it as work, they're forced to recognise how much work goes into a large subreddit. When I was a r/todayIlearned mod at 1m subscribers, 1/35th of its current userbase, it was a professionalised thing with its own meta subreddits/mod chat channel/scheduled shifts to ensure that there was someone on at all times. r/Askhistorians has to fact check every comment in every thread [*as PhD historians, like the scientific subreddits] or else it's overwhelmed immediately. 90%+ of the posts on r/modernart were from people who have no idea what that term means despite it being plastered all over the subreddit, and the moment you allow anything made after 1985~ it's immediately filled with spam. Even at 20-100k subscribers, r/fifthworldproblems had so many low effort posts that it burned out every mod I had trying to decide whether something was both funny and non-referential or not. Doing the job well in any of those subreddits only rewards you with more work while any spurned user is potentially trawling your profile to dox you for removing their post.

The only way I could see them trying to pull it off is through enshittification. I could see them making users pay a subscription fee either for the reddit account or for individual subreddits, especially as a public company legally bound to maximise quarterly shareholder earnings. The userbase is nuked, mods get a fraction of a pool that amounts to less than minimum wage and no worker protections as independent contractors, and every month brings more things making the website worse.