Will this undermine most of what makes IAmA special? Probably. But Reddit leadership has all the funds they need to hire people to perform those extra tasks we formerly undertook as volunteer moderators, and we’d be happy to collaborate with them if they choose to do so.
I think you’re dead-on.
In some ways a degraded system is much harder to fix (or even identify as broken) than an outright destroyed one.
If the IAmA mods vandalized the sub, they would get booted and replaced. But if they just stop doing anything but the bare minimum… that sub was such a magnet for traffic, it might slowly degrade traffic to Reddit as a whole.
But just looking at the data, it might be very very hard to figure out that what is driving that is the IAmA moderators starting to restrict their activities only to moderation. It degrades the experience of the site as a whole.
It’s a fairly brilliant move. They’re doing their duty as mods to the community. If Reddit wants to replace them, it has to be with people who are willing to actively do more work than just moderation, for free. They’d probably have to hire someone just to do AMA.
I really, really hope Victoria is getting a pitiful call from HR right now to come back.