Looking at this site-wide blackout planned (100M+ users affected), it’s clear that if reddit could halt the moderators from protesting the would.
If their entire business can be held hostage by a few power mods, then it’s in their best interest to reduce risk.
Reddit almost 2 decades worth flagged content for various reasons. I could see a future in which all comments are first checked by a LLM before being posted.
Using AI could handle the bulk of automation and would then allow moderation do be done entirely by reddit in-house or off-shore with a few low-paid workers as is done with meta and bytedance.
As I see it, it’s more a philosophical thing than a logistical thing. The word “dead” is misleading since evidently, web usage is higher than ever. I understand that many of the calls made are spurred by people, but there was a statistic this last year that ~40% of HTTPS calls over the last year were made by web scrapers (I’ll have to see if I can find that article again). I’m not refuting that the web is very much alive and very active, “Dead Internet” just happens to be the name of the philosophy. I am also not denying the usefulness or the advantages of automation, in fact, I’m very much in support of it.
I do understand the advantages of automation, background calls, etc. That was never the question and I think we’re digressing from the original topic :P \ As to whether or not we’re rapidly approaching a philosophical delineation as to when the majority of calls are made by people vs. automation in a tongue in cheek joke is all that was. The morality of it and whether or not many of those calls are for active users in the first place was not intended to be a part of the discussion.