The mods of each subreddit are also what kill it. There are people who squash subreddit names just for the lulz[1]. Furthermore, moderator hierarchy is solely based on the date of when they accepted the moderator invitation, which cannot be changed it any way -- if you want to change the hierarchy, someone at the top needs to remove all moderators and re-invite them in the exact order, making sure not to invite anyone before the previous invitation has been accepted, since the timestamp of when you accepted the invitation, not the timestamp of when you were invited, makes the hierarchy.

That system on its own is atrocious, but reddit admins also will leave subreddits suffering from moderator abuse to rot, suggesting to split the userbase by having those not happy with the status quo create a new subreddit. While this is common practice on IRC networks, too, they have more differentiated systems.

Rizon provides a channel takeover policy, which is based on people with minimal access actively requesting foundership over a channel[2], implying that they do care. reddit has /r/redditrequest, but it has intransparent times for how long a reddit request is allowed to stay unanswered, and you can't "skip" moderators higher in the moderation list[3], unlike Rizon's takeover policy, where you can do so if nobody else claims the channel during the three-day grace period. Undernet has a very strict timeout on channel managers (or founders), 21+ days of inactivity allows for a vote by the highest-ranking ops for a new manager[4].

reddit is thus intentionally staying in the past, refusing to deal with a long-standing issue, for which proposals have been made numerous times.

Now, the nice thing about paying money for a subreddit name (which, given the current size of reddit, cannot possibly hold worth comparable to a good domain name) is that it requires a commitment. At least someone on the moderation staff will have to actually shell out money, a limited resource. Instead of solving the moderation/subreddit squashing issue through the way of administrator intervention/software development, which has repeatedly been ignored (search for "mod" on /r/ideasfortheadmins for a bit), it could be solved through requiring active commitment.

Similarly, IRC networks are all run by volunteers who don't get paid for their work, and there are people paying money to keep servers running. While this completely breaks the subreddit <-> IRC channel analogy I've been making above, it still needs to be said. It's not like doing things for free implies that you get things for free.

As for reddit getting backlash over changes? Just check the last two /r/changelog posts, full of angry comments[5]. I don't think they're going to care, so what's there to stop them from charging money for subreddit names?

[1] http://www.reddit.com/r/circlebroke/comments/1wvx09/subreddi...

[2] http://forum.rizon.net/showthread.php?3850-Channel-Takeover-...

[3] http://www.reddit.com/r/redditrequest/wiki/faq

[4] https://cservice.undernet.org/docs/guidelines.html

[5] http://www.reddit.com/r/changelog/comments/2a32sq/experiment... and http://www.reddit.com/r/changelog/comments/27f3a3/reddit_cha...