GankTopPlz

That's a poor way to measure karma since people downvote significantly more liberally than they boost, and boosting isn't a thing on lemmy.

you could say the same thing about linux, but its growing and evolving because of the various avenues that use it.

Reddit could operate without subreddit moderators. The main reason mods exist is to remove abusive users and bots, both of witch could be handled by the vote system.

Reddit requires moderators in order for the business of Reddit to function.

no they dont. they literally have a system to democratically promote or suppress posts.

mods had unilateral control over their communities until very recently. short of doing anything illegal or breaking TOS, mods could ban whoever they wanted for any reason. what stopped this was the fact that communities would riot if mods were to ban random users they simply didn't like. look at places like /r/latestagecapitalism, /r/blackpeopletwitter, /r/witchesvepatriarchy, or /r/conservative, they will all aggressively ban users or block users from posting if they do not go through verification or disagree with the group think. and the community loves it because they're stuck in their echo chambers.

Reddit hires staff to do moderation

and if your neighbor hires a lawn care service, you should be paid?

Right, but you also can't create a work agreement where one was explicitly denied. It's like mowing your neighbors lawn then asking them to pay you, but they told you they wouldn't pay you if you did it before you started. It's the same with the 3rd party app devs too. While I think reddits actions are insane and detrimental to the health of the site, they are fully in their right to deny those devs access to their API and their site as a whole.

the problem is that reddit doesn't give more than -15 on any given comment and 0 negative karma for posts. you can just go around pissing people off and make up for it with 1 post saying the obvious meme. not that given no karma for getting upvotes seems better though.

and reddit has it in their TOS that no one who is a mod is an employee of reddit.

they don't have a contract, they're screwed.

You can always trust a large cooperation to keep your data secret more than any random individuals. They have accountability for losing your data, much more so than the people on the fediverse. A big data breach leads to class action for reddit, here it just takes down an instance and lowers the validity of the technology.

The difference is that you can take reddit/Twitter/Facebook to court over violating your privacy, you won't have anywhere near that kind of luck with fredeverse hosts. If you notice, there isn't really a TOS, those are filled with regulatory agreements from governments that says what they can and can't do with your data. Here we're hanging with our ass in the breeze. Best solution right now if you want to receive DMs is to use an encrypted app and block all DMs here.