In every situation in real life where there is a corrupt person on the brink of losing their position of power, there are dozens of people silently ready to give up their morals to be the next anointed person of power in that position.

The next moderators will be the ones who innately want the new Reddit to succeed. I imagine the newly chosen moderators of the largest communities are those power users/top posters who have been wanting to be a mod for a long time. Here is their chance. They will be given free Premium Reddit and have no problem with ads because they won't see them.

This streamlining of the mods is great for business -- you don't have competing narratives and you still have people doing cheap or almost free labor. It's a thinning of the herd.

Reddit replacing the rebellious mods with complicit mods is going to happen, and it will be good for investors. They want to drive out the unmarketable moderators and users. They want a unified, top-down Reddit to feed information to consumers. No discord, no discussion, no possibility to have a controversial thread or topic accidentally associated with your brand. Total consumption.

The ads currently target people who eat at Taco Bell and worship Jesus (yes, one ad was really trying to get me to subscribe to a service that teaches me the "real" type of love that Jesus preached). This is the 100 billion dollar valuation Reddit that will exist in five years, and it will be successful.

And honestly, fuck /u/spez, but we would all let our personal Reddits die if it meant billionaire status and guaranteed generational wealth for our progeny for the next quarter of a millennium.