I know someone who is a mod for a couple major subs and he absolutely does paid placements (he has his own bot network for everything, but being a mod his shill posts don’t get deleted).
Mods don’t necessarily use their mod power itself for profit, but knowing how the sub works and what users like is very powerful. So is ignoring obvious upvote botnets because they belong to you or another mod.
Something like reddit2 should be run by a minimalist apolitical company.
They should work on building some kind of democracy in each sub-reddit, based on some factors (where "participation quality" is one important factor). If the users are unhappy, they should be able to call for an election, etc.
The reddit2 company should focus primarily on keeping the platform alive and on fighting bots. And on tuning the scoring model.
They should be financed in some way that doesn't depend on the content. Be it individual contributments, random, anomymized advertisments etc.
The company should try to hire apolitical engineers and managers. People who just care about solving an engineering problem.
