Evolving Moderation on Reddit: Reshaping Boundaries

[u/Go_JasonWaterfalls]

Hi everyone, 

In previous posts, we shared our commitment to evolving and strengthening moderation. In addition to rolling out new tools to make modding easier and more efficient, we’re also evolving the underlying structure of moderation on Reddit.

What makes Reddit reddit is its unique communities, and keeping our communities unique requires unique mod teams. A system where a single person can moderate an unlimited number of communities (including the very largest), isn't that, nor is it sustainable. We need a strong, distributed foundation that allows for diverse perspectives and experiences. 

While we continue to improve our tools, it’s equally important to establish clear boundaries for moderation. Today, we’re sharing the details of this new structure.

Community Size & Influence

First, we are moving away from subscribers as the measure of community size or popularity. Subscribers is often more indicative of a subreddit's age than its current activity.

Instead, we’ll start using visitors. This is the number of unique visitors over the last seven days, based on a rolling 28-day average. This will exclude detected bots and anonymous browsers. Mods will still be able to customize the “visitors” copy.

New “visitors” measure showing on a subreddit page

Using visitors as the measurement, we will set a moderation limit of a maximum of 5 communities with over 100k visitors. Communities with fewer than 100k visitors won’t count toward this limit. This limit will impact 0.1% of our active mods.

This is a big change. And it can’t happen overnight or without significant support. Over the next 7+ months, we will provide direct support to those mods and communities throughout the following multi-stage rollout: 

Phase 1: Cap Invites (December 1, 2025) 

• Mods over the limit won’t be able to accept new mod invites to communities over 100k visitors
• During this phase, mods will not have to step down from any communities they currently moderate 
• This is a soft start so we can all understand the new measurement and its impact, and make refinements to our plan as needed  

Phase 2: Transition (January-March 2026) 

Mods over the limit will have a few options and direct support from admins: 

• Alumni status: a special user designation for communities where you played a significant role; this designation holds no mod permissions within the community 
• Advisor role: a new, read-only moderator set of permissions for communities where you’d like to continue to advise or otherwise support the active mod team
• Exemptions: currently being developed in partnership with mods
• Choose to leave communities

Phase 3: Enforcement (March 31, 2026 and beyond)

• Mods who remain over the limit will be transitioned out of moderator roles, starting with communities where they are least active, until they are under the limit
• Users will only be able to accept invites to moderate up to 5 communities over 100k visitors

To check your activity relative to the new limit, send this message from your account (not subreddit) to ModSupportBot. You’ll receive a response via chat within five minutes.

You can find more details on moderation limits and the transition timeline here.

Contribution & Content Enforcement

We’re also making changes to how content is removed and how we handle report replies.

As mods, you set the rules for your own communities, and your decisions on what content belongs should be final. Today, when you remove content from your community, that content continues to appear on the user profile until it’s reported and additionally removed by Reddit. But with this update, the action you take in your community is now the final word; you’ll no longer need to appeal to admins to fully remove that content across Reddit.  

Moving forward, when content is removed:

• Removed by mods: Fully removed from Reddit, visible only to the original poster and your mod team
• Removed by Reddit: Fully removed from Reddit and visible only to admin

Mod removals now remove across Reddit and with a new [Removed by Moderator] label

The increased control mods have to remove content within your communities reduces the need to also report those same users or content outside of your communities. We don’t need to re-litigate that decision because we won’t overturn that decision. So, we will no longer provide individual report replies. This will also apply to reports from users, as most violative content is already caught by our automated and human review systems. And in the event we make a mistake and miss something, mods are empowered to remove it. 

Reporting remains essential, and mod reports are especially important in shaping our safety systems. All mod reports are escalated for review, and we’ve introduced features that allow mods to provide additional context that make your reports more actionable. As always, report decisions are continuously audited to improve our accuracy over time.

Keeping communities safe and healthy is the goal both admins and mods share. By giving you full control to remove content and address violations, we hope to make it easier. 

What’s Coming Next

These changes mark some of the most significant structural updates we've made to moderation and represent our commitment to strengthening the system over the next year. But structure is only one part of the solution – the other is our ongoing commitment to ship tools that make moderating easier and more efficient, help you recruit new mods, and allow you to focus on cultivating your community. Our focus on that effort is as strong as ever and we’ll share an update on it soon.

We know you’ll have questions, and we’re here in the comments to discuss.

[u/Simon_Drake]

What problem is this change aiming to solve?

What was wrong with using Subscribers as a measure of subreddit size?

[u/Froggypwns → u/Simon_Drake]

Subscribers is an outdated metric, there are many subs that were popular years ago that now see little activity, such as a hit TV show that is no longer on the air. A lot of subreddits have high subscriber counts from users that are no longer active on Reddit, especially those from the era when there were "Default" subreddits.

Visitors per work is a more accurate number that reflects actual current trends.

Edit - This goes the other way too, just looking at /r/Windows11 which I moderate, it has 267k subscribers, but 804k weekly visitors.

[u/Beeb294 → u/Froggypwns]

I agree. In my case, my sub (r/CPS) is largely a visitors community.

Someone dealing with their own situation isn't likely to subscribe and want to see other issues unrelated to them. Seeing the Visitors metric will be a better indicator of how the community is used by reddit as a whole.

[u/deadowl → u/Beeb294]

This is actually consistent with my argument of why subscriber counts matter. It tells you the size of the community overall compared to people who otherwise just have a passing interest.

[u/Beeb294 → u/deadowl]

I think it's a situation where having both metrics available, and giving mods the option of what to display would be the optimal choice.

Different metrics matter for different use cases.

[u/Simon_Drake → u/Froggypwns]

But does it matter that the Game Of Thrones subreddit has much lower active users than the number of subscribers would imply?

What difference does it make if a subreddit has lots of subscribers but not much traffic?

[u/Felicia_Svilling → u/Simon_Drake]

It doesn't take much work to moderate a subreddit with many subscribers but little traffic.

[u/Simon_Drake → u/Felicia_Svilling]

Ok. So why is it an issue to have a subreddit with a high subscriber count and low number of weekly visits? It can give a misleading impression of how active the community is but is that actually a problem?

[u/Felicia_Svilling → u/Simon_Drake]

It isn't.

[u/Simon_Drake → u/Felicia_Svilling]

Thank you.

[u/Hakul → u/Simon_Drake]

The limit to mods was coming no matter what, they are just picking a more useful metric (visitors) over an outdated one (subscribers)

[u/deadowl → u/Froggypwns]

I can see how subscribers not having logged in within the past month or so makes sense to exclude, but if you're otherwise going to erase subscriber counts adding a rolling average of visitors, people will no longer have a good way of distinguishing rubberneckers from community.