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- There are groups of moderators that maintain lists and if you get on that list you're banned from umpteen different subreddits as a result. For example... I once had an /r/The_Donald post pop up in my main feed and I posted on it not even realizing what subreddit it was. Next thing I know I'm getting messaged from a dozen or more moderators of other subreddits telling me I've been banned for posting on /r/The_Donald. The sad part is I was disagreeing with what someone said, so I was effectively probably more in-line with these moderators than /r/The_Donald in particular.

- I've had moderators send me messages telling me I was getting put on such and such list and then watching myself get ban message after ban message from subreddits I didn't even know existed.

__REDDIT MODERATORS SHOULD GET BANNED FOR DOING THIS__ But they never will. This is what the reddit admin's are for (cross subreddit moderation). But having said that...

- I once had someone on /r/emulation start using other accounts to start responding to me in ways that strongly implied I was harassing them across subreddits. It was a _COMPLETE_ fabrication but that didn't stop a reddit admin from contacting me directly and threatening to give me a sitewide ban. There's no way this person did that randomly, I guarantee you it works and the only reason I avoided it was by contacting the general reddit admin team and pointing it out with all the evidence that I had had no interaction with these accounts in the past.

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There are also plenty of subreddits I've chosen not to frequent anymore due to either treatment of myself, treatment of others, or just general policy changes. Those include, but are not limited to:

/r/patientgamers /r/rpg_gamers /r/fitness /r/books

In particular, /r/patientgamers and /r/fitness make me sad. I enjoyed them until the moderators decided there needed to be a "woke agenda".

The /r/patientgamers moderator decided it was a good idea to declare to everyone how they would be banned unequivocally for discussions around LBTQ+ issues. I think it was around the broujaja of the Baldurs Gate 3 trans character, but I could be misremembering.

/r/fitness at one point decided they had to have a female moderator. The moderator absolutely had to be female and the sole reason this moderator was to enforce womens rights issues because men can't do it.

I left both w/i days and haven't been back to either. I understand a policy of banning people who step over a line, I don't understand a policy of hiring a moderator whose sole purpose is to look for and preemptively ban behavior that the person being responded to doesn't even think is problematic. And I've seen that happen, I've found myself defending someone who got moderatored for their response to me. If I'm the target of that response and even I don't think it's a problem, where's the problem?

/r/rpg_gamers brought on a mod who is just a dickhead, full stop.

/r/bedbugs banned me for posting a link to amazon, I posted it as a response to a someone giving a recommendation of a strategy to use. Another moderator contacted me a few months later to tell me that mod was a problem and they removed him.

There absolutely NEEDS to be a way for the community to protect itself from moderators.

Nowadays I don't really visit or post on reddit much. Too much noise anyway. I posted this mostly to point out that this isn't nearly a new problem.

OTOH, calling it grooming is out of line and I personally get really tired of people trying to appropriate negative words to further their own personal agenda. It's possible to disagree without calling it grooming.

If this is grooming, then so is teaching a child that loyalty and trustworthiness are important. It's grooming in only the most technical sense, which is not what that word means in common vernacular.

The people involved in this are earnest in wanting to prevent harm (albeit misguided imo), an actual groomer is someone who is purposefully shaping a person so as to __cause__ harm.

It isn't irrelevant if people are using the word grooming to sensationalize the discussion and bias it towards being terrified of the 'trans epidemic/agenda'.

> if my child has the slightest suspicion that they, too, are one of the tiny percentage of intersex/trans people

That is not how any of this works. Someone doesn't go on puberty blockers or get Hormone Therapy because they have 'the slightest suspicion'. If you say to a Dr "I think I might be trans", they don't schedule you for any gender-affirming care. They'd refer you to a therapist so you can work through that (and no, the therapist isn't going to talk you INTO being trans, again, not how that works, far more likely to try to talk you OUT of being trans).

> And if that were the case, and I refused to recognize one of my child's weekly fantasies (he likes to pretend to be a cat, but we don't take _that_ seriously)

Pretending to be a cat and being trans are not comparable.

I would hope as a parent you can distinguish between these weekly fantasies and serious thoughts, feelings, and questions that your child is having about who they are.

> I would be considered a toxic and "transphobic" parent

Yeah... If your kid tells you something big (and potentially to them shameful/scary) about themselves (whatever it is) and you brush it off, that would be kind of toxic and shitty.

> That these medical procedures and gender "counseling" could provided to my child without my input or approval (in the name of "safe spaces") should be alarming to most parents.

In all states, minors who seek transgender treatment need parental consent.

> We need to understand what's going on in our schools and with our children before we smear people with this "transphobia" neologism, because it's not productive nor conducive to discussion.

I agree that this is a complex topic that requires us to have thoughtful in depth discussions, one way to do that is to stop spreading Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt you pulled from a book full of cherry-picked anecdotal stories designed to spread FUD.

That's easily switched off via Settings > About > Crash Reporting & Analytics.

Edit: looking at the explanation below the On/Off switch, it seems this does provide analytics - "most commonly used features". So, turn it off...