It's easy to say "Oh, you shouldn't need moderators" but the reality is, you most certainly do need them. It's like saying "Wikipedia shouldn't need mods or admins". I couldn't see wikipedia existing without them. There are just too many people out there who aim to ruin it for everyone.

Without moderators the system is easier to game, communities will almost immediately go off-topic, and the lowest common denominator will win. It's naive to think that online anonymous internet forums can exist without moderation. It's even more naive to think that you can foster high-quality content without heavy-handed moderation. Subreddits like /r/Askscience just wouldn't exist without it.

When you plant a rose garden, you don't just let the garden grow wild. You prune it to your liking, and to keep the garden healthy. The garden must be meticulously pruned if you want it to look beautiful. Pruning content which break the rules is the same thing.

You certainly do need moderation as a community reaches exorbitant scale, and if there are standards requirements to enforce. Not every online community is Something Awful or Hacker News.

I'm not singling out that Reddit is a flawed community because it has moderators. I am outlining that the behavior they are taking, within their own sense of unwritten standards and "internet points" reminds me of why I left Digg.

This is all further compounded with the sheer number of moderators who are editing /r/news and on other subreddits, especially those that are specifically covering the NSA/GCHQ stories.

It's arguable that the moderators of a given subreddit constitute the community of that subreddit. A group of 5 people regularly interacting around a common purpose is a community. A group of 200,000 people occasionally clicking arrows is not.

That's like suggesting people don't constitute as a citizens if they're not politicians.

I'm sure those 5 users will have mountains of fun if you remove the other 200,000 people, and leave the 5 to upvote, comment and moderated each others posts.

It's not arguable at all. The community doesn't exist without the community. It's the submissions and the discussions by the users that makes it such, not the people in charge. The community exists without leaders, but leaders are not leaders without a community.

Community has a broader definition than you are giving it. We can each think different aspects of a thing are more interesting embodiments of different definitions.

I think it is interesting to look at the kernel as the community and come up with some other word to describe the participants. You think this is crazy.