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I'm not sure how the moderators are relevant. The communities still exist. The moderator isn't the community itself.

• johnnyanmac 3y ago
  Moderators shape the community. Whether or not that shape sticks after they leave depends a lot on the community and what rules they keep/enforce. for example, r/fishing bans memes. What if mod A leaves and mod B allows memes? Experience says that memes proceed to take over r/fishing anf the community tone changes. Sure, r/fishing "exists", but does it exist for the reasons you subscribed? You can even use HN as a whole here. How much do you think the tone of HN would change if Dang dissapeared tomorrow? That's the issue that was understated during these protests. Moderation is thankless work and even without drama it can burn one out.
• nunez 3y ago
  Moderators enforce quality thresholds and keep trolls out that makes those communities possible. They used lots of custom bots to do this. Many, such as bots that detected abuse from users, used Pushshift, an API and front-end for crawling through archived Reddit posts. (Reddit's API limits you to 1000 posts/thread and has rate limits on the number of posts you can search through.) Apollo and other apps aside, a large chunk of the protests from moderators were because of how the API would render their moderation bots completely useless and Reddit's inability to provide better alternatives. Most vocal amongst them was the moderation team of /r/AskHistorians, an extremely well-curated sub that heavily used bots to enforce their very high submission and participation standards.