Looking at this site-wide blackout planned (100M+ users affected), it’s clear that if reddit could halt the moderators from protesting the would.
If their entire business can be held hostage by a few power mods, then it’s in their best interest to reduce risk.
Reddit almost 2 decades worth flagged content for various reasons. I could see a future in which all comments are first checked by a LLM before being posted.
Using AI could handle the bulk of automation and would then allow moderation do be done entirely by reddit in-house or off-shore with a few low-paid workers as is done with meta and bytedance.
Do you happen to know how a HTTPS transaction made by an App counts? I don’t mean the apps that are just a fancy browser but for example multiplayer games that communicate with the server or a banking app with a fixed design that just updates the amount of money you have.
I’d rather say the internet becomes more efficient instead of dead. Why manually reload a whole website when you can use a API that only pulls needed Data? With increased automation you’ll only transmit what’s needed. Imagine you would need to reload a old forum page every few minutes to see if you got an answer instead of waiting for the push notification.
Sure, a lot of requests come from robovacs or so but in general I think a big chunk of the automatic traffic comes as the result of decreasing the amount of traffic that would exist otherwise.