Why do we need moderators at all? I've never had a Reddit account but in the spirit of the current Reddit discussions, moderators are required due to the shee

Why do we need moderators at all? I've never had a Reddit account but in the spirit of the current Reddit discussions, moderators are required due to the sheer scale/size of Reddit. Automation is far from being able to keep threats, illegal content and abusive messages off the system. One set of global admins would just shuffle where these admins are to a centralized location much like how Facebook is moderated. There are pros and cons to distributed moderators, too many to name here. I also understand that Reddit may not have invested much in human capitol around moderation meaning that they must have the volunteer distributed moderators to keep running or they would need to start building large centralized moderation teams like Facebook. From what I have read thus far I would not expect this to occur. If they centralize the volunteers then there would be a higher risk of power-tripping moderators managing communities they are not actually a part of. This also increases security risks. Pop one moderator in a centralized model and now the entire site can be nuked. The risk of this is lower in a paid centralized model as the moderators are employees or contractors can their access can be limited with VPN's and other corporate tools. This type of moderation also requires really good audit trails. I have no idea if Reddit has this level of auditing. Even in the old school forums phpBB and the like I had moderators for specific sub-categories that could only moderate the part of the forum that they focused on. Global moderators carry multiple risks and require a great deal of trust.