Who moderates the mods on Reddit?

You do by voting with your wallet and not using or engaging with the platform.

Well, I've noticed that the complaints about reddit removal tend to focus on two things. Either the mods are dictators, or there's too many bots.

Having been a mod there, I can promise you that the single biggest thing to handle was new accounts that ignore the rules, usually by posting spam, off topic, or chronically reposted top ten posts. In other words, the vast majority of posts that needed removing were bots trying to advertise, or build enough karma via reposting so they could post spam ads.

It sucks, but that's the way reddit set things up, so spam farms took advantage of it. The most reliable way to deal with the problem was to set up automod to just remove anything from accounts that were too new, or didn't have enough karma.

That's what automod is, it uses a set of criteria to handle repetitive actions based on common events. It isn't a new thing, it isn't rare, and it's not actually a bad thing until there's so many bots that get posts removed and then spam modmail with copy/paste messages so that regular human users can't get through. Seriously, the bots were set up to automatically send a modmail on a post removal. Not all of them, but enough that you could go through a dozen modmail messages and 1 wouldn't be the same things repeated.

Besides, new humans tend to also be idiots and not read a sub's rules, then whine when you remove their rule breaking post, so it isn't like the humans are better than the bots in that regard.

Appeals aren't meant for users that don't meet an age/karma threshold. There's no interpretation of that, you either meet the requirements, or you don't. Nobody is special, nobody deserves an exception, that's just how reddit works, and has for years.

The automated message sent to you clearly explains why it's automated, why they don't bother looking at complaints about it, and (being blunt), the fact that you aren't even aware automod exists kinda means you don't need to be posting there yet.

The message you got is absolutely not in violation of reddit policy. To the contrary, it's one of the things reddit suggests as part of setting things up. Account age/karma filtering is a core component of the mod tools, and has been for at least the last decade or so (probably longer, but a decade means memory can't be fully trusted on something this minor).

Now, there are reddit policies about what mods can and can't do. Reddit, however, enforces those at whim, and with unreliable outcomes when they decide a mod has done something wrong. There's employees of reddit that handle such things.

Now, I haven't been back there since the final stages of the debacle last year. So they may have changed things a good bit. But, before the protests, they didn't care about mods enforcing sub rules at all. If it wasn't something major, and broke reddit policies, there was no such thing as an appeal to reddit because nothing would ever come of it. Even with reddit wide rules, if it wasn't a big enough stink to hit the news somewhere, they didn't do anything.

In other words, up until last year, whoever was top mod effectively owned their sub as long as it wasn't attracting outside attention. You'd find niche cases where someone would end up as top mod via fuckery, and reddit would step in, but that was rare.

Whatever opinion a user (or mod) might have of that policy is their right, but it ain't new, and it ain't surprising.

Again, let me repeat, removing posts with automod based in account age is an ability provided by reddit, and has never been something they overturn, and any semi-populous sub that used account age filtering ignored modmail about it.

If you want to waste your time, and that of reddit computers, there is a support page on reddit. You can try appealing that way, but you'll get a copy/paste response because admins don't waste their time with complaints about it either. Reddit uses automod to send automated responses to messages about age/karma filtering.