“First, we are moving away from subscribers as the measure of community size or popularity. Subscribers is often more indicative of a subreddit’s age than its current activity.”

“Instead, we’ll start using visitors. This is the number of unique visitors over the last seven days, based on a rolling 28-day average. This will exclude detected bots and anonymous browsers. Mods will still be able to customize the “visitors” copy.”

“Using visitors as the measurement, we will set a moderation limit of a maximum of 5 communities with over 100k visitors. Communities with fewer than 100k visitors won’t count toward this limit. This limit will impact 0.1% of our active mods.” Source

Whether or not you agree or disagree with this - What’s interesting to me here, is Reddits current preparation timescale. This isn’t going to be enforced until March 31st, 2026. This tells me that Reddit would have been unprepared for a complete mass-walkout of community moderators during the 2023 Reddit API strikes. A large chunk of Reddit during that period was genuinely inaccessible. But after a few token gestures and a few examples made of some especially rebellious mod-teams, most of the striking moderators returned.

A huge opportunity was missed by people running major communities to functionally degrade Reddit in at least the medium-term as a website. You can’t just hastily promote random people to replace moderators Reddit is either forced to remove or who leave voluntarily. The average person is likely too lazy, too arbitrary and too corrupt to effectively oversee communities of notable sizes.