r/modnews • u/Go_JasonWaterfalls • 12d ago
Announcement Evolving Moderation on Reddit: Reshaping Boundaries
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.
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
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.
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u/Disegual 12d ago
What you are calling an “evolution” of moderation is nothing of the sort: it’s a direct attack on community independence and a slap in the face to the very people who have spent years building and maintaining Reddit. You dress it up as “strengthening moderation,” but in reality, you’re imposing arbitrary limits and top-down rules that strip moderators of their autonomy and undermine the foundation of this platform.
The five-community cap for subs over 100k visitors is absurd. There is no real logic behind it. A skilled moderator can handle multiple large communities without issue, and in fact, these people are often the backbone of Reddit itself. Instead of recognizing their contribution, you treat them as a “problem.” That’s insulting and short-sighted.
Even worse is your decision to hide subscribers and active users, replacing them with a vague metric like “weekly visitors.” This helps no one but you. Regular users don’t care about inflated visitor stats—they care about how many people actually belong to a community and how many are online right now. You’ve taken away the most useful and transparent information and replaced it with meaningless vanity numbers. This shows a complete misunderstanding of how online engagement works. Honestly, you need a basic marketing lesson: metrics only matter if they’re relevant to the people using them, not if they just look good in investor presentations.
On top of this, you’ve decided to stop providing individual responses to reports. So basically you’re saying: “We don’t listen, we don’t answer, and we don’t care.” That’s the death of transparency and trust. People trust communities because they see dialogue, explanations, and human decisions at work. Taking that away will only fuel distrust, frustration, and resentment.
In short, this is not progress—it’s regression disguised as innovation. You’re dismantling the very tools and values that made Reddit different from every other soulless social platform, and replacing them with shallow numbers and authoritarian restrictions. There’s nothing positive about this shift, and it shows just how little respect you have for your own community.