As some subreddits continue blackouts to protest Reddit’s plans to charge high prices for its API, Reddit has informed the moderators of those subreddits that it has plans to replace resistant moderation teams to keep spaces “open and accessible to users.”
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.
Between Monday and Wednesday of this week, the majority of popular subreddits on the Reddit site participated in a “blackout” and went private or stopped allowing new posts to be made in order to protest planned API changes that will cause the shutdown of popular third-party Reddit apps like Apollo.
https://www.macrumors.com/2023/06/15/reddit-threatens-to-remove-subreddit-moderators/