It's toxic because people wanting power insist their position is necessary, others adhere to it (mostly in the name of censoring dissent) and those granted the power, like with politics, are often the last people you want having it.
Based purely on anecdotal evidence, I would say that Reddit would be far better off if it relegated "moderators" to "janitors" to remove illegal content, and auditing who is removing what regularly, and leaving the "quality" and discoverability of the legal content to be derived from the upvote/downvote system they first relied on.
> leaving the "quality" and discoverability of the legal content to be derived from the upvote/downvote system they first relied on.
Unfortunately this leads to meme cesspools lacking any major discussion. reddit's ease of discovery backfires here: it's difficult to keep a subreddit's content focused and meaningful if any random person who isn't invested in keeping quality content can wander in. Moderators, and their removal of "too shallow" content, dedicated days for memes or discussions, and creation of dedicated low-quality subreddits, are a necessary evil.
Based purely on anecdotal evidence, I would say that Reddit would be far better off if it relegated "moderators" to "janitors" to remove illegal content, and auditing who is removing what regularly, and leaving the "quality" and discoverability of the legal content to be derived from the upvote/downvote system they first relied on.