If you want to see the best of Reddit, go to r/WhitePolitics, r/faggots, or r/FatPussy. You will not find sickos and slurs there—not anymore, anyway. Instead, these subreddits are obsessed with, respectively: the color white, bundles of sticks, and rather large cats.

In the past few years, Reddit communities once devoted to outré subjects, everything from InfoWars' Alex Jones to objectifying tall women, have seen themselves hijacked and replaced by tame, often literal-minded send-ups of their original purpose. It's very funny, it's very Reddit, and it's all the doing of a band of counter-trolling moderators who take their duties very seriously. Their antics are easy to root for. What's less understood is how these individuals operate—and at what cost. Trolling the trolls, it turns out, takes a toll.

First, consider classic trolling: the icky kind. It takes time and organization, and those are its practitioners' biggest weaknesses. If you're going to pop up like a hobgoblin sowing discord in comments sections across the internet, you can't spend too many resources in any one place. Far-right trolls, in particular, are notoriously disorganized and prone to infighting. That means there are an awful lot of hateful but poorly moderated subreddits out there, ripe for the hijacking. (We should note: Advance Publications, Condé Nast's parent company, is Reddit's majority shareholder.)

The work of converting those swamps into arable webland is hard—and often deeply personal. (Though some mods say it's "just for shits and giggles.") The first task is identifying hateful subreddits, tracked at places like r/AgainstHateSubs. Once you find one, lurk on the threads for a while, getting a sense of who's there and what they're saying. But stay quiet: You might share an identity with the group the sub is designed to attack, so it's best not to attract attention. Then, you wait. Make sure the previous moderators have been asleep at the switch for 60 days or more and submit a request to administrators to be made the new mod. Voilà. The subreddit is yours.

Drewie, who has been a redditor for more than seven years and moderates more than 50 subreddits, has always kept an eye on subs that sting her most. She's trans and knows the harms and humiliations the internet can bring. She has a string of successful hijackings to her name—communities like r/Trannys (now about car transmissions) and r/Dykes (you know, like water-retaining embankments) make up her kingdom. Her most recent conquest was r/AlexJones, but the one she remembers best is r/faggots. She'd been eyeing the community from a distance for a while, but then there was rumbling among Reddit's moderators: The deposed alt-right troll king Milo Yiannopoulos had just requested control of the sub.

Controversy ensued, but with no opposition, the administrators would likely grant it to him. Drewie wouldn't have it. Yiannopoulos is a Gamergate alum, expert at trolling the people she wanted to protect; r/faggots, she feared, would become another platform to rally his troops. She submitted a counter request, telling the admins she planned to make the hate sub into something fun and satirical. They gave her the keys instead.

Drewie's vigilante tactics might be in the service of good, but they were pioneered by the very trolls she's trying to fight.

Since harassment and bullying are verboten, Drewie promptly scrubbed r/faggots of hateful posts and posters, turning the subreddit into an empty space for her and her allies to fill in. She thinks she won over the admins—who are notorious for leaving moderators to scrap out problems on their own, no matter what kind of hate speech redditors are spewing—by making them laugh. For Drewie, though, replacing homophobia with piles of sticks is about more than the lulz. "I'm Asian, I have a middle-class job, I pass, but a lot of the people I know don't," she says. "I have to use that to do something. I can't just sit down and say, 'Oh, I've got it good.' I have no choice."