I’ve seen that number floated around and am also skeptical. But if it’s accurate, Reddit should just… do it. Full control of their site of hundreds of millions of users for the payroll of a medium sized business? They’d be stupid not to.
And honestly, I wouldn’t even be mad. Paying their mods would effectively pop the balloon of my moral outrage.
You want to deny your employees the tools they need to do their jobs? Fine, it’s your productivity that will suffer, no one else’s. You want to rule the site with an iron fist? At least you’re not being huge hypocrites and pretending it’s community-run.
The problem is that Reddit can’t actually do that. Because the cost (as others have pointed out) would be way higher even at minimum wage. Reddit is completely reliant on free labour. It would have gone under a long time ago without it. Given the leadership’s hostility towards the people that create the content and help maintain that content, Reddit going under is overdue and the platform is now past it’s use by.