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Reddit Mod is a "job" AI will likely replace.
There currently is a kerfuffle over the actions of a moderator of r/art which seem to be a shining example of the petty and arbitrary cruelty in which Reddit mods are free to indulge as unpaid volunteers. This made me think that Reddit Mods are very similar to Dungeon Masters in Hasbro's Dungeons and Dragons game, although why may not be clear to you readers.
Hasbro's DnD seems to be on a mission to alienate DMs from DnD in order to more directly access the players, which Hasbro llikely views as their real customers. It sees DMs as unpaid volunteers which intermediate the use of their product by consumers. In the past (under TSR) this was seen as a beneficial use of free labor but under the corporate ownership of Hasbro DMs were seen as extracting value from the role of player intermediary which could theoretically go to Hasbro's bottom line. Hasbro until recently had been pursuing an online strategy which would move the pen-and=paper RPG into an online platform which likely eventually would obviate the need for DMs. In an online platform directly controlled by Hasbro not a single dollar of Hasbro's money would be lost to a DM's horny depiction of a female character, the DM's unique approach to personal hygiene, nor the arbitrary and unfair cruelty of a power=tripping DM.
Outside of the online platform Hasbro has also moved to shift power away from DMs and towards players. Mechanically there are things like the new death save system which makes a player character death much more mechanically difficult than in past editions of the game. The caveats in old editions that the written rules are just suggestions and that the rulings of the DM are final have been removed. Recently there has been rumors of a move to disallow the DM screen, a folding barrier which allowed the DM to conceal things like maps of areas yet unseen by players or detailed character sheets for NPCs. All of this seems designed to dimish the role of the DM.
And a similar effort to more directly control the expereince of end-users likely will happen at Reddit. This latest controversy is over a mod not only permanently banning a professional artist from r/art for an offhand comment that prints of the art he posted were availible but also erasing his entire r/art post history simply for offering an apology and asking to be reinstated. This is pretty representative of the arbitrary nature of Reddit mod power and likely has been repeated many times in cases where the user did not have access to a large audience on a different platform, as did the artist in this case.
Reddit will likely recognize that an AI facilitated system could let them hire a handful of paid moderators who will be committed to act in a fair and professional manner, disintermediating the existing volunteer moderators. Reddit is already a bulk of the training data for most LLMs and Reddit itself already has a massive dataset of moderator actions which could be used for training. All it would likely take at this point is a major controversy or perhaps a string of moderate controversies to motivate them to implement a new system.
" Recently there has been rumors of a move to disallow the DM screen, a folding barrier which allowed the DM to conceal things like maps of areas yet unseen by players or detailed character sheets for NPCs. "
Interestingly, co-creator of D&D Dave Arnesson experimented with a DM screen so big he was invisible to the players to see if that increased their immersion. He saw it as a tool for the players. He also didn't always give players their character sheets, for the same reason, always looking for ways to make the player have a better experience. It is interesting that everything Hasbro is exploring they are seeing as having an opposite effect as the creators.
An interesting overlap between your two positions is archived on the page with the most downvotes of all time.
https://www.reddit.com/r/ListOfComments/wiki/downvoted/
#3 is Roll20 the largest VTT virtual tabletop for people to play games online. The short version of how it be the largest scandal in reddit history as ranked by downvotes is that the owner of roll20 was a mod on his own company's channel in violation of reddit policies, and banned people for criticism of his products. When someone actually tried to help him and got banned the owner made a post insulting him for asking for help. Reddit cleaned up the situation after it got this big. But the wider community never heard about it and didn't care. Nothing changed long term.
Based on this, I really don't think users care about how reddit is managed in any meaningful way. A small loud minority maybe, but I give it >67% the average user will not care or even learn that AI has taken the mod jobs. Reddit will just continue on like nothing happened.
Maybe, but it suffers from both ends of the legitimacy problem. At one extreme, some people will never accept a judgement from an LLM as legitimate. At the other extreme, people will perceive LLMs as being "more than impartial" when, in truth, they are a different kind of arbitrary.