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.”