In a comment shared by r/Apple moderator @aaronp613, Reddit cited its Moderator Code of Conduct and said that it has a duty to keep communities “relied upon by thousands or even millions of users” operational. Mods who do not agree to reopen subreddits that have gone private will be removed.
If a moderator team unanimously decides to stop moderating, we will invite new, active moderators to keep these spaces open and accessible to users. If there is no consensus, but at least one mod wants to keep the community going, we will respect their decisions and remove those who no longer want to moderate from the mod team.
Mostly power users will leave for something else, which in turn leads to worse content on Reddit.
power users and mods leaving. The big key is how moderation continues on reddit. whether the scab mods and those that stayed are able to control the bots and spam or not. if they can, then reddit continues mostly as normal.