[londons_explore]

I don't think they'd have enough replacements ready quick enough. They'd have to decide between an influx of spam from having no moderation and upset users, massive disruption from upset disruptive moderators, or stale content by freezing all submissions to the site.

If I were in their position, I would have trained for this scenario, and already prepared a way to put entire subreddits into 'read only' mode which just replays history - ie. show funny cat pictures from last year. Then any subreddit that starts talking too much about leaving for a new platform gets put in read only mode. Let people think they are still interacting - ie. people can still upvote/downvote/comment, but it's mostly/all dummy stuff.

But... I bet they haven't prepared, and will be caught off guard.

[ThrowawayTestr]

>I don't think they'd have enough replacements ready quick enough.

There is never a shortage of losers desperate for a crumb of power.

[Macha]

Sure, there would be no shortage of applicants, and they'd all largely fall foul of the Douglas Adams rule about those who seek power. But they need not just people who'd put their hand up and do the moderation, but wouldn't drive all the users away (whether immediately or long term), which would be the hard part.