A Reddit moment is an expression used to refer to a certain type of cringe ‘cringeworthy behavior or content’ judged characteristic of Redditors, habitual users of the forum website reddit.com. It seems hard to pin down what makes cringe Redditor-like, but discussion on Urban Dictionary suggests that one salient feature is a belief in one’s superiority, or the superiority of Redditors in general; a related feature is irl behavior that takes Reddit too seriously. The normal usage is as an interjection of sorts; presented with cringeworthy internet content (a screenshot or URL), one might simply respond “Reddit moment”.
However, Reddit isn’t the only community that can have a similar type of pejorative X moment. One can find many instances of crackhead moment, describing unpredictable or spazzy behavior. A more complicated example comes from a friend, who shared a link about a software developer who deliberately sabotaged a widely used JavaScript software library to protest the Russian invasion of Ukraine. JavaScript, and the Node.js community in particular, has been extremely vulnerable to both deliberate sabotage and accidental bricking ‘irreversible destruction of technology’, and naturally my friend sent the link with the commentary “js moment”. The one thing that seems to unite all X moment snowclones is a shared negative evaluation of the community in the common ground.