Reddit cannot survive without its moderators. I think it can survive. Turn a profit? Probably not. It would have to hire on a massive centralized moderator

Reddit cannot survive without its moderators. I think it can survive. Turn a profit? Probably not. It would have to hire on a massive centralized moderator team and operate much like Facebook with the key difference being all those moderators would have to hit the ground running on an already massive site vs the organic growth of FB. It would be very bumpy and risk causing even more turmoil. They would be applying very generalized moderation rules to all subreddits and I suspect that would drive even more people away. But that is my opinion from an outsiders point of view as I have never had a Reddit account and only moderated small forums by today's standards.