Three days ago, someone made a post on /r/bisexual. It wasn't great. It definitely wasn't the worst thing I've ever seen on our LGBT subs, but it wasn't great, either.

Instead of telling our mods about it, or reporting it, someone went over to this sub to complain about it.

As soon as our mods were informed about it, we went and removed the post.

Someone else made a not-so-great comment in the comments section of the original post. People here complained about that.

But when someone actually spoke to that person and explained to them that what they had said could be offensive to trans folks, they apologized and edited their comment. (That's what we want to see. We want people to learn and grow and become better allies.)

Meanwhile, someone from this sub used a throwaway account to go over to /r/bisexual to go complain about the original post, and they were heavily upvoted and supported for it. Because /r/bisexual isn't a terribly transphobic subreddit, and most of the people there support trans folks. There's a few people here and there who could use a little extra education, but by and large it's a pretty safe subreddit and it's supportive towards trans folks.

But that wasn't good enough, either, because some folks from this sub went to go cherry-pick the few comments that were downvoted in that thread, too.

So here we are, three days later, and we've still got folks making spiteful little comments about /r/bisexual. That's not fair to our users and it doesn't help our community at all. It doesn't help our bi community and it doesn't help our trans community, all it does is make folks angry.

Meanwhile I'm doing things like removing people like darth_turgid from our trans subs, because they finally managed to say something that got through our AutoMod filters. It turns out, they've been making nasty comments on our subs for months, but their comments have been getting removed by AutoMod, because our filters on those subs are that strong.

The reason the filters on our trans subs are that strong is because our mods have done an excellent job writing and improving those filters. Some of us, myself included, have spent years developing those filters.

Go check darth_turgid's profile. Look at their comments. We get dozens of people like that on our LGBT subs, every day. That's the sort of stuff that y'all don't see because our mods handle it. That's also why we encourage folks to report things to our mods instead of running off to other subreddits to stir people up and get folks upset.

Go to /r/trans or /r/MtF and search for a post there called 'Bigots, Trolls, and You' - it's about an organized hate brigade that hit us in the summer of 2021. You'll also notice that every single account in that big list of brigaders and abusers has been suspended. I had to get two site admins involved to get that done, and that on top of spending the better part of two months manually reviewing folks' accounts so we could let our genuine users into those subs and keep the trolls out while both subs were private.

That's not unusual. We deal with organized hate like that nearly every summer. We got hit earlier this year from an attempted brigade from a different website; they were upset about stuff from reddit's Place event. They tried hitting us for roughly three weeks, and again, about 95% of the stuff they tried hitting us with got caught in our filters or stopped by one of our mods. Very little actually made it through to where our users could actually see it.

We're out here fighting the big ticket items, and it makes our job much easier when folks actually use the report button or message our mods so we can go handle the smaller stuff like that. Going out and upsetting a few dozen people doesn't help the situation for anyone at all.