>You're asking other people to do your work for you.

Yes, I am.

>You are the one who's supposed to contribute your up/downvote.

But that's the problem. My upvote / downvote doesn't matter. If I'm in r/funny it doesn't matter how often I downvote unfunny things - the sub will still be inundated with garbage posts - subjectivity of humor aside. I don't mean "That joke didn't make me laugh", I mean there is nothing within the content of the post that indicates it's even an attempt at humor. The only thing left for me to do in the face of such a situation is to leave and go somewhere else. The only way for my vote (on posts themselves) to mean anything is moderator action.

I'm not (and I don't think anyone else is) arguing that every sub should have strict rules and moderation. But strict moderation is a necessary tool for many of the subreddits that I enjoy to exist. A lack of moderation would turn r/askHistorians into a swamp of ignorant hearsay, answers based solely on what one dude read on Wikipedia, and general misinformation in no time at all. The only vote that I have that matters on reddit is the vote for which subreddits I subscribe to, not the posts within those subreddits.

Your vote matters exactly as much as it should matter. Why should you (or anyone else, including moderators) get any more of a say than anyone else? What have the moderators done to qualify themselves?

You're visiting a work in progress, not a completed product.

Most people go to reddit to hear about news or see what's popular, not to sift through new submissions for gems. If reddit cared only about democracy, it would solve the problem of an incredible submission being buried by a measly five to ten downvotes in its first twenty minutes regardless of how many people would have liked it overall. Personally, I have neither the time nor the incentive to try to influence groupthink. (I was very careful in my choice of "groupthink." A democratized frontpage that hundreds of thousands of people influence is almost equivalent to literal groupthink. And that's not terrible in and of itself, but if you're going to argue that mods should be stripped of their tools, then it becomes quite the dilemma.)

HN, on the other hand, seems much truer to the overall thrust of your argument, because there are no downvotes for submissions, and only two upvotes are needed for a story to reach the first or second page of HN. But HN only works because there are exceptionally smart and prudent moderators who are constantly curating the singular frontpage.

If Reddit had the moderators that HN had (and the proportional quantity), there simply would be no problem. HN mods are a group of people selected specifically for the task of moderation. They were appointed.

But Reddit doesn't have those kinds of moderators, because the moderation system is alarmingly broken on Reddit.

The folks who moderate the various reddits are there by no virtue other than the fact that they were either there first, or have some relationship to the person who was there first.

It keeps sounding like there's a crisis of identity happening over at Reddit HQ, and I really hope they come out the other side of it with an understanding of how damaging moderators have been to the website, as currently implemented.

  The folks who moderate the various reddits are there by no virtue other than 
  the fact that they were either there first, or have some relationship to the 
  person who was there first.

This is what I think the biggest problem with Reddit is. There needs to be a better system for picking moderators. I don't know what that would be but the current one is broken.