I spent like 3 years in that subreddit without really believing I was transgender. Around 2021 I shocked myself when I responded to a bigoted comment and automatically wanted to say “we” when describing trans people. I was so immersed in trans culture and felt such an affinity for them that I was already thinking of myself as a transfem before I was ever consciously certain. Simply not knowing I wanted to be a woman held me back for my entire childhood, but because of r/traaa, I could finally graduate from ignorance to denial.
r/egg_irl had a big impact, but if hadn’t spent so much time in r/traaa, then the egg memes would’ve scared me off. If I haven’t spent so much time there, then I might not have cracked and finally gotten to experience actually living for once. If not for that safe space, I might’ve never been able to disarm all the internalized transphobia and gatekeeping that can be all too common in more pickme trans spaces. A big part of why blahaj.zone is so important to me is that it reminds me of that place which no longer exists.
The API changes basically killed the third party moderation tools that the mods relied on, and they had no interest in continuing to moderate without them. Whenever I peak back on Reddit, it seems like more bullshit slips through the cracks than before and even the culture of the platform in the better subreddits seems to have regressed compared to the past. On top of that, users being able to hide their profiles causes mods to waste time finding workarounds just to see if someone is a troll or not. It seems like so many users don’t notice it because they’ve gotten used to the crap and every other corpo platform is somehow even worse.