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I've been a mod so I'm biased but I'd say...yes. Reddit is benefiting from a lot of unpaid labour to keep things running.
It really is like being a janitor. When you do it well, people take it for granted. But people quickly notice when the rubbish starts to pile up.
Especially since it takes a small number of defectors (especially for small subs) for things to get bad. I've mentioned this before but we had a situation where one user was making 2% of the posts. And they were prone to drama. Such types eventually get banned (I could have taken a harsher stance on banning them earlier) but just imagine the disproportionate impact such an obsessive person could have on the climate of a sub if they aren't deterred.
A ton of stuff is done on the backend users don't care about. And yes, removing spam is one part of it - big subs like /r/movies and /r/sports would be unusable if mods didn't prune the 6,000 reposts of the same breaking news . Another thing is nipping negative shit in the bud before it becomes a problem
So long as it isn't too contentious, users likely won't notice or be thankful though.
Can you elaborate on this?
As I said there are people who just run around posting disproportionately and being negative. One example is podcast threads: you can have someone jump into a thread that was just posted (well before they could listen to it ) and make snide, low-effort comments about guests or the host (including back-handed comments like "well, at least he had a good guest this time"). Then that's the first thing everyone sees and a significant portion of the discussion is not about the topic but whether the guest is awful or not in some unrelated issue or, even worse, whether the sub is too toxic and so on.
Then there's users who have some grudge with each other and it can drag out across threads and weeks. Nipping it in the bud by simply removing those comments removes the incentives for that pettiness cause no one will ever see it.
I've previously described the psychology of a certain sort of poster that seems determined to ruin a sub and such people just have to be deterred or banned early.
There's also inflammatory off-topic stuff like HBD that has, ime, never went anywhere good. If it doesn't violate the relevance rule then we're stuck with it. But it actually did make life more bearable for everyone to just not discuss it (it seemed to draw the above sort of people like flies). The sub markedly became worse when it actually became relevant and we could no longer remove it.
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