I don’t know if you can still see them without an account but even a few years ago this was well-known and you could verify it yourself by looking at the moderator list of almost any default subreddit; we’re talking about less than a few hundred users. There was no limit to how many subreddits you could moderate for most of Reddit’s history so in the early days a few users created as many subreddits as they could. A bunch of these moderators effectively shut down Reddit over changes to the API a couple of years ago. Steve Huffman compared the system to a landed gentry:

> “If you’re a politician or a business owner, you are accountable to your constituents. So a politician needs to be elected, and a business owner can be fired by its shareholders,” he said.

> “And I think, on Reddit, the analogy is closer to the landed gentry: The people who get there first get to stay there and pass it down to their descendants, and that is not democratic.”

See this Reddit discussion:

“The same 5 people moderates 500 of the most popular subreddits”

https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/gjl27j/the_...

It appears the original post they are discussing was removed. Seems like Reddit banned the original user who collected this data and deleted their posts.

Another discussion about this:

“Six powermods control 118 of the top 500 subreddits”

https://www.reddit.com/r/WatchRedditDie/comments/gkkfg5/upda...