I’d like to take a moment today to share with you about some of the features and tools that have been recently deployed, as well as to update you on the status of the Community Dialogue project that we kicked off some months ago.

We first would like to thank those of you who have participated in our quarterly moderator surveys. We’ve learned a lot from them, including that overall moderators are largely happy with Reddit (87.5% were slightly, moderately, or extremely satisfied with Reddit), and that you are largely very happy with moderation (only about 6.3% are reporting that you are extremely or moderately dissatisfied). Most importantly, we heard your feedback regarding mod tools, where about 14.6% of you say that you’re unhappy.

We re-focused and a number of technical improvements were identified and implemented over the last couple of months. Reddit is investing heavily in infrastructure for moderation, which can be seen in our releases of:

• Mod tools on mobile web
• New modmail
• Improvements to subreddit rules
• Spoiler tags for posts
• Better community discovery with the mobile featured carousel
• Mod Tools for Native Mobile

On the community management side, we heard comments and reset priorities internally toward other initiatives, such as bringing the average close time for r/redditrequest from almost 60 days to around 2 weeks, and decreasing our response time on admin support tickets from several weeks to hours, on average.

But this leaves a third, important piece to address, the Community Dialogue process. Much of the conversation on r/communitydialogue revolved around characteristics of a healthy community. This Moderator Guidelines for Healthy Communities represents a distillation of a great deal of feedback that we got from nearly 1000 moderators. These guidelines represent the best of Reddit, and it’s important to say that none of this is “new ground” - these guidelines represent the best practices of a healthy community, and reflect what most of you are already doing on a daily basis. With this document, though, we make it clear that these are the standards to which we hold each other as we manage communities here.

But first, a process note: these guidelines are posted informationally and won’t become effective until Monday, April 17, 2017 to allow time for mods to adjust your processes to match. After that, we hope that all of our communities will be following and living out these principles. The position of the community team has always been that we operate primarily through education, with enforcement tools as a last resort. That position continues unchanged. If a community is not in compliance, we will attempt conversation and education before enforcement, etc. That is our primary mechanism to move the needle on this. Our hope is that these few guidelines will help to ensure that our users know what to expect and how to participate on Reddit.

Best wishes,

u/AchievementUnlockd

Moderator Guidelines for Healthy Communities

Effective April 17, 2017

We’ve developed a few ground rules to help keep Reddit consistent, growing and fun for all involved. On a day to day basis, what does this mean? There won’t be much difference for most of you – these are the norms you already govern your communities by.

1. 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.

2. Management of your own Community. Moderators are important to the Reddit ecosystem. In order to have some consistency:

   1. Community Descriptions: Please describe what your community is, so that all users can find what they are looking for on the site.
      
   2. Clear, Concise, and Consistent Guidelines: 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.
      
   3. Stable and Active Teams of Moderators: Healthy communities have moderators who are around to answer questions of their community and engage with the admins.
      
   4. Association to a Brand: 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.
      
   5. Use of Email: 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.
      
   6. Appeals: 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.
      

3. Remember the Content Policy: You are obligated to comply with our Content Policy.

4. Management of Multiple Communities: 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.

5. Respect the Platform. 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.

We thank the community for their assistance in putting these together! If you have questions about these -- please let us know by going to https://www.reddit.com/r/modsupport.

The Reddit Community Team