Admin realized that despite all the applications, there were:

• People requesting the subreddit so they could continue the protests.
• People requesting the subreddit so they could give it back to the original mods.
• People requesting the subreddit so they could own it.
• People requesting the subreddit because they have strong feelings about "moderation" and want to /worldpolitics it.
• Absolutely no one who wanted to just do what the old mods did.

From what I could see, there no actual good-faith requests from people who genuinely cared about /TIHI and wanted to moderate it well and diligently. And like, who's surprised? It's a huge subreddit without a concrete community core, it's more of a content category. I don't think anyone except the mods cared about the community itself, because there barely was one.

That's the same issue they're running into with the other large subs. They're too huge and too general and everyone is just another face in the crowd, so there are very few people who care about that specific space in the way that makes for good volunteer moderators - in most cases, when those people existed for those communities, they were already recruited into the old mod team.

And all the people who want to mod are either activists for the protest, the sort of power-hungry weirdos that end up as powermods, but who showed up to Reddit too late, or somebody with an axe to grind about moderation in general seeing an opportunity in the massive unmoderated subreddit.