[zarzavat]

Badly moderated subreddits get replaced all the time by better moderated ones. The system is inherently meritocratic: if you abuse your modding power then your community is going leave and go somewhere else.

[lrae]

Subreddit mods abuse their power on the daily. 99.9% of the users just won't care about that as long as they're not the abused ones.

Which is the same spez bets on in the API / 3rd party app situation, which is kind of funny :)