In a comment shared by r/Apple moderator @aaronp613, Reddit cited its Moderator Code of Conduct and said that it has a duty to keep communities “relied upon by thousands or even millions of users” operational. Mods who do not agree to reopen subreddits that have gone private will be removed.
If a moderator team unanimously decides to stop moderating, we will invite new, active moderators to keep these spaces open and accessible to users. If there is no consensus, but at least one mod wants to keep the community going, we will respect their decisions and remove those who no longer want to moderate from the mod team.
They wouldn’t want to pay someone to run communities, the “thinking” work that moderators do.
They won’t mind paying call-center-level employees/contractors to do the janitor work, the “unthinking” work, which is voluminous.
They only have to do it until more mods come on board.
And don’t forget they already have a lot of mods from subs that didn’t blackout at all, and likely some from subs that already reopened.
It will not be hard or too terribly expensive for them to keep things running well enough that the masses are placated.
You’d hate to see disgruntled former users fill the subs with trash and unhelpful information. That would take a lot of work to police and repair.