On the teenage mod thing, I have a bit of insight-

So basically modding on Reddit sucks. You feel like you have zero support for a volunteer position and it genuinely becomes taxing. I moderated a large subreddit (4 mill+ subs) for a few years alongside 2 smaller (still 100k+) ones. Both of these were exhausting and I ended up letting auto mod do half the work.

I got invited by a friend to moderate a default subreddit. I lasted less than a week. The types of things people post on there that the users never see is horrifying and whenever I can afford therapy it will be getting brought up. I'm talking early 2000s gore sites level shit in addition to the buckets of CSAM.

I started moderating one of the smaller communities back in high school. Let me tell you, my time was worthless back then and I was on top of everything. Once college started, that slowed down a lot and setting up auto mod for the common stuff became entirely necessary. Once I graduated, I suddenly had zero want to moderate. I barely touched anything and automated 99% of my tasks.

Basically what I'm trying to say is that moderating defaults is damn near a full time job, and most of us adults just don't want to do it. I know I sure as hell didn't.

And let me tell you, some of the mods on there get just an awful break. Almost all of them are just people trying to build communities, many of whom have no idea how, especially once they get big. The real people to watch out for are the mods no one knows the name of. I know for a fact that many power mods were completely unknown. They used dozens of sock puppets to moderate hundreds of communities, all of them aggregated in private discords. I managed to find a wild invite to one once, but I got booted before I could start taking screenshots