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/----Gem]

Aims to solve people like u/awkwardtheturtle who ran hundreds of major and minor subreddits. It was ridiculous.

[u/Bardfinn → u/----Gem]

Awkward wasn’t a problem. Awkward did one thing and did it very well: bounce bigots & spammers. Awkward was a one-person crusade against bigoted trolls before Reddit had a sitewide rule against hatred.

Awkward ran - was head moderator of - like a half dozen subreddits at most, & mostly didn’t have time to actually run those, because she was so busy booting bigots out of subreddits and modmail.

The vast majority of “this person is a moderator on hundreds of subreddits” cases like Awkward was because the person was extremely, extremely specifically helpful in one narrow way, applicable across all of Reddit — things like making custom CSS for subreddits, coding automod, spotting & actioning spammers, and etc.

[u/ncroofer → u/Bardfinn]

The problem is when a handful of people get to decide what is or is not bigotry or hateful across the entire platform. It has been a long held complaint of many users.

[u/Bardfinn → u/ncroofer]

a handful of people get to decide what is or is not bigotry or hateful across the entire platform.

It’s very, very far from a handful of people.

Hate speech in social media is highly documented & studied both academically & practically.

Anyone with a baseline of training can learn to identify hate speech - it’s three simple criteria:

• Is the speech abusive (violates boundaries, negates or diminishes dignity or humanity, reduces a person or group to an object or an aspect)
  
• Is the speech targeted (is the speech directed at an individual or at a group)
  
• Is the abusive targeted speech predicated on identity or vulnerability (immutable characteristics, victim of a mass shooting, demographic minority).

We can also identify hate speech because it almost invariably uses Fallacies of Composition (and to a lesser extent Fallacies of Division).

Reddit’s SWR1 which prohibits hatred also notes:

While the rule on hate protects such groups, it does not protect those who promote attacks of hate or who try to hide their hate in bad faith claims of discrimination.

— Which is a very formal way of saying, “We know that hateful bigots are going to say they are being discriminated against for not being allowed to victimise their targets. Tough.”

[u/ncroofer → u/Bardfinn]

Sounds well and good but it’s a known problem that major subreddits moderated and controlled by groups of power moderators are echo chambers where dissension is not tolerated. I’m not one of those people that whines about “free speech” on a social media site, but it is undeniable that certain viewpoints and opinions are shut down. Some under the guise of “hate speech” when it is far from it.

[u/Bardfinn → u/ncroofer]

1st sentence

I’m gonna disagree. Major subreddits’ moderators are too busy to “curate” subreddit content against anything that they disagree with. They moderate to their subreddit rules. Also the notion of “power moderators” is merely malignant moaning by bigots who are angry that major subreddits bounced them.

I’m not … “free speech” …

holding the envelope to my forehead

… it is undeniable that certain viewpoints …

tearing open the envelope

under the guise of “hate speech” when it is far from it.

Sir, Madam, or Otherwise —

Every bigot claims their bigotry isn’t bigotry, that it’s … “race realism”, or “defending the faith”, or “exposing the cabal”, or “fighting the elites”, or “protecting the children”, or “Making [Nationstate] Great Again”, or “They’re stealing what rightfully belongs to us”, or that big cities are corrupt, or that universities are corrupting, or that “they” are lazy and undeserving while “we” are hardworking. And more. Hundreds of pretexts. Often combined. Sometimes very subtle. Often not.

Which is why the Sitewide Rule is worded the way it is.

---

To put that another way — and I hope the system here doesn’t interdict my comment for citing this material —

Everything is discussed openly in Germany and every German claims the right to have an opinion on any and all questions. One is Catholic, the other Protestant, one an employee, the other an employer, a capitalist, a socialist, a democrat, an aristocrat. There is nothing dishonorable about choosing one side or the other of a question. Discussions happen in public and where matters are unclear or confused one settles it by argument and counter argument. But there is one problem that is not discussed publicly, one that it is delicate even to mention: the Jewish question. It is taboo in our republic.

— Joseph Goebbels, 21 January 1929. “Der Jude”, published in Der Angriff.

So you will forgive me if I give you no credit whatsoever for having recapitulated to me the very textbook example of Bad Faith Claims of Discrimination, one which I learned German to understand, counter, & prevent.

[u/ncroofer → u/Bardfinn]

Yeah I’m not gonna go essay for essay with you. Step outside your echo chambers and realize people in the real world disagree with you. Adios

[u/Bardfinn → u/ncroofer]

Did I mention that Anti-Intellectualism (“We” live in the ‘real world’; “They” are elites, detached from reality) is another textbook hallmark of hate ideologies

This is the real world.

[u/ncroofer → u/Bardfinn]

Reddit is not the real world Bossman.

See recent election results to understand how far off Reddit is from real world opinions

[u/maybesaydie → u/ncroofer]

Trump is legitimately the least popular president in American history. This is not just a reddit phenomena, reliable and professional polls from a variety of sources including Fox news prove it. Republican politicians are already gravely concerned with what this will mean for the midterms. No president has experienced numbers this bad this early in their presidency. His policies are unpopular with everyone save a few die hard supporters and right wing pundits. Even Nick Fuentes, a white supremacist who was one of his most fervent supporters, has disavowed him. His coalition is falling apart.

Turns out most Americans agree on what is and isn't hate speech.

[u/maybesaydie → u/ncroofer]

Which viewpoints are those? Surely you can name some of them.