You cannot, in fact, rely on the community users more. It does not scale.
You'll see situations where most people are nominally opposed to low-effort memes while everyone upvotes the low-effort memes, and then people complain that there are too many low-effort memes cluttering the front page and now the sub is trash and they're leaving.
edit: though honestly I don't think volunteer mods scale well either. A tiny niche sub can get by with just a couple mods just fine, but when they get 100x as popular, can they then have 200 mods? Or have 2000 mods for the most popular subs? No, there's just no way to coordinate that many volunteers sensibly, not in an environment like Reddit.
You'll see situations where most people are nominally opposed to low-effort memes while everyone upvotes the low-effort memes, and then people complain that there are too many low-effort memes cluttering the front page and now the sub is trash and they're leaving.
edit: though honestly I don't think volunteer mods scale well either. A tiny niche sub can get by with just a couple mods just fine, but when they get 100x as popular, can they then have 200 mods? Or have 2000 mods for the most popular subs? No, there's just no way to coordinate that many volunteers sensibly, not in an environment like Reddit.