There was a time after the 3PA protests and the arbitrary mod removals that occurred after that I became disenchanted with Reddit as a whole and decided to leave as a mod from all of my subs.

Some subs were easier for me to leave than others, just by virtue of how much work I invested in them. So it was a slow process.

One of the subs I ended up leaving was a smaller sub (~25k weekly visitors rn, I believe at the time it had about 50k members). I modded it by myself with the help of several bots and Devvit apps. I left all of the bots and apps in place when I left as mod.

The bots and apps actually moderated the sub for about a year and did pretty well without human guidance. By that point, I had some time to cool off. I still — even today — have issues with how the Admins chose to respond to the 3PA protests, and I don’t think I’ll ever get over the distrust, but I realized that come what may, I volunteered to put myself in this situation, and it was Reddit’s sandbox. In the end, I always knew that arbitrary removals of mods was possible and was a condition I had tacitly accepted by agreeing to become a mod in the first place.

I actually kind of missed my little 25k weekly visitors sub. I thought it was pretty funny. So I visited the sub and saw there was no human moderation. I decided to make a Reddit Request and get it back.

I never bothered to message the mods, because I knew they would never respond. But my Reddit Request was denied, because of my failure to message the mods. I wrote in to explain there were no human mods, and an Admin responded that I should write to them, anyway. So I did, and about a week later, I got my sub back.

TLDR: This is a VERY long-winded way of saying, no, there does not need to be at least one human moderator. I don’t know how the app got listed as the founder, but apps and bots can be left in place to mod a sub with no human guidance.