Yeah - I ran a public forum as part of a publishing non-profit for about 12 years, so I've got nothing but sympathy for the mods.

Feel like telling a bit of what it was like, so here goes.

We got a fraction of the traffic Reddit did and the moderation was without a doubt the most difficult and least rewarding part of the effort - took up between 50% - 90% of our time, depending on how pissed off particular users were.

I finally gave up after the third wave of Turkish hackers (who were pissed that we had posted pictures of a broken window from a riot in Cyprus) hit us in a wave of spam accounts, ddos attacks, and finally hacked our shared service provider (I was soooo pissed about this, as I'd spend months hardening our site from their previous attacks, and I'd been relying on our hosting provider to have their backend secure) to hijack the website. I'm pretty sure they were Edrogan funded with a mandate, as the picture was really innocuous and their response to it was completely over the top. We were a small art & literature website. I can only imagine what mods on Reddit go through on a daily basis.