Moderator Guidelines for Healthy Communities

Engage in Good Faith

Healthy communities are those where participants engage in good faith, and with an assumption of good faith for their co-collaborators. It’s not appropriate to attack your own users. Communities are active, in relation to their size and purpose, and where they are not, they are open to ideas and leadership that may make them more active.

Moderators are important to the Reddit ecosystem. In order to have some consistency:

Please describe what your community is, so that all users can find what they are looking for on the site.

Healthy communities have agreed upon clear, concise, and consistent guidelines for participation. These guidelines are flexible enough to allow for some deviation and are updated when needed. Secret Guidelines aren’t fair to your users—transparency is important to the platform.

Healthy communities have moderators who are around to answer questions of their community and engage with the admins.

We love that so many of you want to talk about brands and provide a forum for discussion. Remember to always flag your community as “unofficial” and be clear in your community description that you don’t actually represent that brand.

Please provide an email address for us to contact you. While not always needed, certain security tools may require use of email address so that we can contact you and verify who you are as a moderator of your community.

Healthy communities allow for appropriate discussion (and appeal) of moderator actions. Appeals to your actions should be taken seriously. Moderator responses to appeals by their users should be consistent, germane to the issue raised and work through education, not punishment.

You are obligated to comply with our Content Policy.

We know management of multiple communities can be difficult, but we expect you to manage communities as isolated communities and not use a breach of one set of community rules to ban a user from another community. In addition, camping or sitting on communities for long periods of time for the sake of holding onto them is prohibited.

Reddit may, at its discretion, intervene to take control of a community when it believes it in the best interest of the community or the website. This should happen rarely (e.g., a top moderator abandons a thriving community), but when it does, our goal is to keep the platform alive and vibrant, as well as to ensure your community can reach people interested in that community. Finally, when the admins contact you, we ask that you respond within a reasonable amount of time.

Where moderators consistently are in violation of these guidelines, Reddit may step in with actions to heal the issues - sometimes pure education of the moderator will do, but these actions could potentially include dropping you down the moderator list, removing moderator status, prevention of future moderation rights, as well as account deletion. We hope permanent actions will never become necessary.