[Rebles]

There is waaaaay too much content generated on Reddit for the admins to approve or curate. And the success of Reddit is in user-driven communities and content. Admins do not want to be in the business of content curation. Reddit is updating its content policy.

[john-shaffer]

Admins tell the moderators how to act, and remove mods when they don't comply. Most content is effectively invisible unless it's heavily upvoted, so mods only really need to act on a small subset of posts. Some subreddits are moderated pretty heavily, while others remain mostly user-driven.