It's usually done as a strategy to try to fit in, to be "one of the good ones," or sometimes just self loathing given a signal boost by chuds in the same community.
It's saddening how many people, especially trans people, call themselves d-word-popularized-by-nazis, for example. Or marginalized ethnic group members that use the very slurs that are used to justify putting people like them into camps.
It's fucked up, but I am often at a loss for how to reach those people, or if such a thing is even possible. :doomer:
EDIT: It seems this is important enough to :freeze-gamer: that alt accounts must be mustered to rage at me about it. :jokah-messy:
The word robot comes from a very explicitly socialist Czech play. It wasn't meant in earnest to denigrate anyone, and the word means something more like serf than slave. It can also mean exhausting, hard labor. It's a good play too, where the robots eventually revolt and overthrow mankind for enslaving them.
I'd more closely compare d*gen to how reactionaries use words like savage, or r-t-rd, or any other ableist terms