If Reddit continues to double down on their mistakes, I wonder if they'll go as far as to forcibly reassign control of major subreddits in order to reopen them. They certainly have the technical capability to do so, although I'd expect such an action to result in a mass exodus from Reddit and a massive loss of trust. At the end of the day, Reddit has the final say over what goes on in their website, but playing that card seems risky.
They can easily do that to the major subreddits without losing much trust at all. How many users do you think really care about the mods of /r/videos? I doubt very many. They should probably make the generic default ones like that admin moderated anyway. The amount of users who actually care about this is shockingly low. Something like 0.5% of users use third party apps? I saw surveys on subreddits with millions of subscribers about participating in this getting ~1000 votes in total. The number of users currently having their Reddit experience ruined by moderators far exceeds the number having their experience ruined by Reddit api changes.
I've only moderated small subreddits and even I know the chaos that results from not having bot-driven subreddit management tools. You may hate Automoderator when it deletes your carefully crafted post for whatever reason, but I guarantee you will hate Reddit itself when your favorite subs become overrun with illegal and off-topic spam.
The race will be between Reddit admins recognizing the degradation of the user experience and the outflow of users who don't want to visit their favorite subreddit because they keep seeing decapitated heads and underage pornography and every conversation is off topic.
This is really tangential to the core issue of charging for API access, as it’s essentially just an implementation detail. Losing moderation functionality is a valid complaint, but Reddit doesn’t need a free API for that to exist. There’s no reason to think that the required functionality won’t be implemented into the service. Your complaint here is also, rather obviously, massively overblown. The free API never enabled a moderation tool that automatically detected and removed gore or child porn, so there’s really no reason to think your claims about that content have any credibility.
> the free API never enabled a moderation tool that automatically detected and removed gore or child porn
I have no idea what subreddits are using these days, but I'm familiar with spambot, that compared any submitted image against blacklists. For anyone managing a NSFW subreddit, such a tool is an absolute necessity to avoid getting sent to the penalty box by Reddit admins.
I don't know what's being used now, but when I was familiar with it, spambot was monitoring dozens of NSFW subreddits that had tens of thousands of subscribers. This is only one of thousands of such customized moderation bots that use the free API.
