The moderator issue has been a problem for a long time. You yourself may have only recently discovered it, but it's been a problem since subreddits have existed.

- 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.