For example, these wouldn't be the insults you would here from anyone who qualifies as centrist or anything further right unless you are legitimately doing something wrong. There are also plenty of more conservative subreddits with awful mods too that would never use those insults. And if someone calls you a "transphobe" on some niche gardening subreddit, odds are you are doing something obnoxious and off topic that would upset the mods regardless of whether you are actually a transphobe.
Combine that all together and it starts to sound like OP is one of those people who is "running into assholes all day" without ever questioning whether that is any indication of their own behavior.
Gaslighting in action.
To earn the Transphobe badge, all you have to do is complain about anyone else bringing up the subject of trans-anything on a niche gardening subreddit. Or refuse to boycott Harry Potter.
You're very quick to denounce this guy as an asshole "doing something wrong" based on absolutely no material information-- just a bunch of assumptions and speculation. Hardly an honest assessment on your part.
In my experience on reddit, most of the time people heavily complain about how awful mods are it ends up being that person was actually just an asshole.
I agree that mods can be an issue and many are power hungry weirdos. I’ve been on reddit over a decade and have dealt with them plenty. My solution to dealing with subs run by bad moderators is unsubscribing/filtering them, as the content is typically of poor quality anyway and it’s usually a giant echo chamber. If that solution doesn’t work and you are constantly running into problem mods, it’s more likely that you are the problem or maybe you are seeking out communities where it's very likely to be ran by bad, heavily political moderators.
The comment in question above does seem like the typical comment you see on reddit, where when you look at their post history you realize they totally deserved it. If that’s actually the case for this person, I can’t say, I agree there isn’t enough info. But I can say I’m not surprised people are quick to assume that’s the case, cause it definitely reminds me of those kinds of comments where that is the case.
Yes, this is the "obnoxious and off topic" behavior I was talking about. The mods of a niche gardening subreddit likely don't want to moderate a debate about your refusal to boycott Harry Potter.
For instance, I recently earned the badge by saying the Dax character on DS9 isn't "a trans person"... she's an alien with a symbiote, that has lived 7 lives and doesn't much care which gender of body it inhabits per se, or whom its host is going around kissing.
I'm providing plenty of content here in my comments based on which to either denounce me as an asshole or to agree that I'm not one.
That's p clearly a metaphor for fluid concepts of gender and sexuality.
Many people come to niche subreddits specifically to get away from all the divisive political rhetoric that has infected all other corners of the internet.
If it walks like a duck...
A partial defense is the reactionaries are quite good at mainstreaming their blather. For example, a few of us fell for Haidt's moral foundations nonsense, if only briefly.
