[LegitShady]

>At a certain point Reddit might decide that it’s simpler and cheaper to pay an ops person $15/hr to manage

if this was a profitable and beneficial endeavour it would already work this way. The reason moderation still lies in the community's hands (to whatever degree it does) is because reddit has hundreds of millions of monthly users and many tens of thousands of large subreddits and this is not $15/h but millions of dollars in costs per month that is currently being donated by community members to a large for profit company.

It also adds a layer of deniability for reddit - "we didn't do it, that moderator did it" etc. You can see what the response to moderation is on twitter and figure out how valuable not having to deal with it yourself is.

Your solution isn't scalable with profit.