They are certainly replaceable, but they just as certainly not fungible.
Reddit management clearly made a mistake here, not because it annoyed some moderators, but because they showed poor understanding of a fundamental part of their business (i.e. this is a lot of avoidable bad press, if nothing else)
They seem to have realized this, and are working on amending process. Nothing wrong with that, this is how things can improve.
They seem to have realized this, and are working on amending process.
I'm not holding my breath. Reddit has promised moderators better tools and users better transparency and more features for months and years. So far, all those promises have been completely empty, and I see nothing to suggest things will be different this time.
Put more crudely, at least two people on the reddit staff, Ohanian and Pao, are completely full of shit.
I agree with this. Many social networks (friendster, myspace, Digg, etc) die of community collapse. If someone funded voat.co so they could keep their servers up and the mods and community jumped ship reddit's business would take a serious hit.
Reddit management clearly made a mistake here, not because it annoyed some moderators, but because they showed poor understanding of a fundamental part of their business (i.e. this is a lot of avoidable bad press, if nothing else)
They seem to have realized this, and are working on amending process. Nothing wrong with that, this is how things can improve.