Mods used third party tools to help them with their unpaid work. These tools relied on access to the reddit api.
Then reddit charged ridiculous prices for api access, which would mean the apps would need money, so mods would need to pay to do their unpaid work or use the inferior reddit interface.
Given these choices, some mods decided to leave instead.
I used a pinephone for a week or so, but people got angry at me, because calling me was impossible. Apart from that it is a slow but very interesting device. Mine is broken now, because I somehow managed to fry the wifi chip. I used arch btw.