Reddit's not just interested in server costs now, though, they need to extract the maximum profit out of all their content. (We may have created the content, but they own it now).

Their main beef with the 3rd party apps seems to be that they were profitable while Reddit itself wasn't. But those apps did one thing, and did it well. Reddit is super bloated and out of touch.

They can't. Not without removing the part that makes reddit worthwhile, which are small dedicated communities.

Sure, an AI can moderate shit like /pics /politics /funny /gaming. Those are basically just garbage article/repost feeds anyway.

Can an AI moderate say... buildapcsales? Where you need a human moderator to verify if the deal is valid, add additional info to the flair and mark deals as expired? Technically yes, but it would require a specially trained AI, that knows how to scrape particular websites and avoid detection, which is not a great look for reddit and is also a ton of work.

What about a TV show subreddit? There has been instances where episodes were leaked, and the moderators had to protect the community from spoilers. Can an AI do it? Again, if it's manually trained on this new data it could. But are reddit employees going to illegally download leaked episodes to feed the to the algorithm?

At that point, you'd be spending more time and money on babysitting each AI than if you just moderated manually.

Oh lord, I didn't even consider the hell scape of rage-bait algorithms moderated by AI. I want to get off Mr. Bone's Wild Ride.

Probably got lambasted for being one of the worst non-apology apologies in the history of apologizing.