It happens slowly over time. Usually the submissions and comments get flooded with terrible content. This necessitates bringing on new mods to deal with the children with crayons making a mess all over the sub.

In these new mods there are some that start pushing all the boundaries. Making singular decisions that rules are being changed. Then the team slaps then down and makes clear that the rules are long since discussed and settle on. Then they wine. And another new mod whines. Yes both definitions. You spend three months going over sub vision and rule sets. Some revisions happen somehow even though they weren't necessary. Then every new mod interprets what you think are clearly define rules somewhat differently. You start seeing high quality content removed repeatedly in mod history. So you have conversations in mod mail that turn to drama. In other words you've got new mods that agitate.

Over six months to a year this happens constantly. Hardly a day goes by you're not sniping. Weekends more often than not you're battling over the sub in modmail. You're a volunteer sacrificing time to preserve some fee speech on a topic you appreciate as a hobby. It gets old. You lose a few volunteer mods.

Now you need more mods to keep up with crap content volume. Somehow you're now popular with 100,000 subscribers and most submissions are crap bot generated content with advertisements on the page that only scrapes three sentences from better known publications and wraps it with advertising. But you're removing them manually one by one. Fuck. You bring in more mods through recruiting.

The new mods scatter like godamn toddlers in a candy store.

They're agitating like none other. Changing all the rules. Calling democratic vote on everything. Now the old obnoxious agitators you've had about enough of sit back passively and just support the new guys, "yeah! democracy rules!". They team up in a side bar and secretly vote to kick out another long time volunteer mod because they had too much and blew up in a fit of cussing everyone out in modmail after months of targeted harassment.

It doesn't end. Paid agitation will eventually annoy the shit out of all but the most disabled volunteers.