He has to just be riling up the "freeze peach" crowd with that line. He must know that a "users vote" way of selecting mods is always going to be a race to the bottom in terms of diversity and quality as nobody with a unique vision is going to subject themselves to the will of a bunch of reddit-brained people.

When I was part of the Vaxxhappened protest I came to the realization that pretty much all mods of big communities are not "power happy" autocrats, but on the whole surprisingly weak-willed and living in a perpetual fear of getting removed. It was sad, but I have to imagine Reddit Inc is very happy with the arrangement. These people are working 24/7 for free, on one of the many indistinguishable feeds of memes. I was very surprised the API protest happened to the degree it did at all.