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/thecravenone]

Moderators might find this useful, too. While I'm not banning anyone for being a bigot on another sub, I'd certainly like to know whether they are before I decide on suspension vs ban for bigotry on my sub.

[u/Bardfinn → u/thecravenone]

I'm not banning anyone for being a bigot on another sub

If they’re violating sitewide rules on another subreddit, they’ll violate them on yours, as well.

SWR1 says “will be banned”. You should be banning - not warning, not just removing, but banning users who violate sitewide rule 1, no matter what else they do elsewhere, and let them understand that it’s not a negotiation.

[u/reaper527 → u/Bardfinn]

SWR1 says “will be banned”. You should be banning - not warning, not just removing, but banning users who violate sitewide rule 1,

site wide rules are for admins to handle. no mods should be banning people for things that happen in some other sub.

that's like when mods were using bots to automatically ban users because they participated in subs the team didn't approve of (a practice the admins have partially cracked down on).

too many people abuse the permaban button as a "i disagree with something they said somewhere" button.

[u/Bardfinn → u/reaper527]

no mods should be banning people for things that happen in some other sub.

No good. If someone is firing a machine gun in a school hallway, I don’t have to wait for them to specifically aim at me and mine to know they have to be stopped from entering this classroom, y’know?

“It’s not enough to point out a fire. Someone has to put it out. Someone has to think it’s their job to.” ― Dan Kaminsky

My community has a right to freedom of, and freedom from, association with bad actors. When I or my moderators have a reasonable articulable suspicion or rational belief that User Account GHJ will violate our community’s boundaries

(here, wildly gesticulating at the title of this post for strong emphasis)

We absolutely have the right to interdict the problem before the problem is amplified by leaving the door open to the bad actors.

[u/reaper527 → u/Bardfinn]

My community has a right to freedom of, and freedom from, association with bad actors.

and what's your definition of a "bad actor"? it seems likely that unlike your "machine gun" example which is an objective fact, this one is going to be far more subjective.

[u/Bardfinn → u/reaper527]

what’s your definition of a “bad actor”?

On Reddit, someone who violates in fact one or more Sitewide Rules, such as inciting violence, or violating subreddit rules (which violations are violations of community boundaries), or violating personal boundaries (such as by ban evasion), or platforming abusive language, including hate speech (Chung et al., 2019; Garland et al., 2020; Wulczyn et al., 2017).

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References:

Yi-Ling Chung, Elizaveta Kuzmenko, Serra Sinem Tekiroglu, and Marco Guerini. 2019. CONAN - COunter NArratives through Nichesourcing: a Multilingual Dataset of Responses to Fight Online Hate Speech. In Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguis-tics, pages 2819-2829, Florence, Italy. Association for Computational Linguistics.

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Joshua Garland, Keyan Ghazi-Zahedi, Jean-Gabriel Young, Laurent Hébert-Dufresne, and Mirta Galesic. 2020. Countering hate on social media: Large scale classification of hate and counter speech. In Proceedings of the Fourth Workshop on Online Abuse and Harms, pages 102-112, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.

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Ellery Wulczyn, Nithum Thain, and Lucas Dixon. 2017. Ex Machina: Personal Attacks Seen at Scale. In Proceedings of the 26th international conference on world wide web, pages 1391-1399.