awkwardtheturtle, beyond any question. Was a moderator for literally thousands of subreddits, would intentionally post content they knew was going to stir the pot, and would then go on a banning spree.
Who was also untouchable and got away with their bullshit, for unknown reasons. Their posts were garbage reposts with metric shit tons of upvotes. The theory was admins let them post whatever because it brought engagement to their platform. All the /r/SteamDeck nods are pretty trash too, though.
Probably not the worst of all time (that title goes to u/Spez, former moderator of r/jailbait), but I once made an innocuous post on r/DeathGrips, the community page for an industrial hip-hop group, saying that the shitposts were getting pretty unfunny and the overall quality of the sub was going down and spent the next ~10 months dealing with random PMs from the head mod insulting me and sending screenshots of himself downvoting every single comment/post I ever made (even ones outside of his sub and posts I made before that post). That was definitely a unique experience.
The Mods on most crypto subs were horrible. Any opinion that is contrary to the groupthink would get you immediately disciplined.
And yeah, that happened on other subs too. But the crypto subs were particularly insidious because you knew that some of them were active since the beginning of crypto, which means they got in early, and are likely filthy rich. So they don't have a day job anymore (other than shilling their latest crypto project), and have more time to be petty and vindictive.
There were others too, but yeah, r/bitcoin was the worst. It got to the point where I simply stopped writing our r/bitcoin anywhere on Reddit, because I didn't want to be accused of brigading.
r/dogecoin also got insufferable once Doge got above $.01. The worst thing that ever happened to the Dogecoin community was for the coin to actually be worth something.
Subjectively, in my personal experience the worst mod I ever encountered was Ghislaine Maxwell Maxwellhill.
There are whole articles out there about how bad their moderation was.
They somehow had enough people convinced that their sockpuppet "Anutensil" was a separate user that it joined the same mod teams and constantly advocated for them. Which is crazy because a utensil literally means a tool (that they were using to consolidate power).
Edit: actually objectively it's probably someone like CarlH who was the mod of carlhprogramming but also irl turned out to be this pedo guy who kept his own young son in a basement and tortured and abused him.
Most of the LGBT subs had really bad moderation. If you pushed back on xenogender stuff they would not only ban you from the sub but try to get the admins to ban you from reddit.
Normally when I see a post I don't care about I just keep scrolling. I respect that you went out of your way to let random strangers know you're gonna keep scrolling lol