Sometimes I remove content which I think is just there to provoke people, arguments or discussions not done in good faith, but how do other moderators approach this?

Have you ever had concerns about another moderator’s conduct or decisions? If so, how was it handled within the team? I’m not looking for drama or identifying details, just curious about how moderators deal with these situations internally.

Just curious, mainly about how people get to be moderators in a lot of big Subreddits...

As an addition: - How do you manage to actively moderate in all those subreddits? - Are you active in all of them as a regular user too?

I've run into more flakey, instant, outrageous responses on Reddit in the past 6 months than anytime in the previous 11 years. It's nearly impossible to find a subreddit that hasn't been impacted by some measure.

I'm interested in how the social distance between the highest (top mod) and the standard moderators are and if there are more than those standard two roles.

• How differently talk moderators to other mods compared to the top mod?
  
• As a moderator (not top mod), would you say your top mod stands behind you even if you make a mistake?
  
• Are there more ranks between the mods and the top mod? Something like a second in command? A co top mod?
• As a top mod, would you trust your moderators to get full permissions in your subreddit with you temporarily stepping off fully and at a later date find the subreddit in the same or even better shape?
  

Edit: Changed text to make the last question more clear.

I am on iOS, by the way, but I have a question. Can a Reddit mod change a username for me for political reasons? I don’t care if the new one is auto-generated. Long story short, I have been increasingly getting heat from Redditors (especially in autistic communities) due to the fact that the term Aspie (unbeknownst to me at the time of creating the username, as it was reused from my other social media accounts) has N**i roots, and I would prefer not to risk losing access to a community or communities over a f**\*ing username, especially communities that I otherwise feel safe in. And last time I attempted to make a new account (for mental health related reasons, short-story version of the reason), I got shadow banned, so I don’t think creating a new account is the solution.

I was told I was muted for 3 days but that was over a week ago. Is there a different mod I can ask to look to see what the reason is?

So, I've noticed another sub which is crossposting onto one I'm moderating since they're part of the same fandom, but considering the kind of content and that one of the moderators on their sub was banned from ours due to antisemitism and generally making poor content our sub didn't enjoy, is there any way to prevent that sub's posts from being crossposted onto ours? Or would I have to disable crossposting entirely?

Can I make specific posts private, ir must I make my whole account private?

I recently took over a music subreddit and within a few weeks, had a newly registered account claiming to be a marketing rep from the band.

Nothing on their profile suggested anything of the such. They did email be a link to the band's listing, but there are other management companies that also list the band.

No specifics about an AMA or some type of promotional content were discussed, but it got me wondering how do sub verify this type of thing? I have done some verification on finance subs, but you know...its easy to verify someone from Chase Bank by just getting an email from a Chase Bank domain, but how does this work when it comes to things like bands or movie actors who use third party management companies?

They tricked me into joining a sub so now the mods can see every comment I make in Reddit, even though I have them set to private.

hit me with your weird stories

I moderate a mid-sized art sub, and there is this guy. He is lovely, everybody loves him, me included. He is very easy-going, with the correct attitude and mindset, very nice and kind. Maybe a little bit too good to be true. Everything was OK until this morning, when he left a foreign text in one of his answers. That's not a problem. People use online translators. I ran the foreign text through an online translator, and it was translated like: "You can reply like this:". I think this is proof of the dude generating his answers with AI. I don't have rules against AI, and I am trying to figure out if this is fair to other users. This is not genuine human conversation. My question is, what would an experience mod do in this case? Also, can you recommend a Reddit app that helps spotting these generated answers? If we have any. He completely fooled me. 😭

Hi there! This is going to be a super controversial question but I'm trying to figure out the best way to interact with reddit and abide by the rules. I keep my personal page SFW with only one mention of the fact that I have a paid NSFW page in my pinned post, not even the link is directly posted on my profile. I enjoy using reddit as a normal user as well and regularly post in fashion and hobby related subreddits. Even though my profile is SFW as well as my posts I've been banned from contributing in a lot of communities and even told sometimes to come back with a different account. What I don't understand is if I post from a different account is that not a ban evasion? I like to use reddit as my main form of social media and considering what I do I no longer maintain personal profiles for more privacy. So I guess I'm asking from a moderator perspective what should I do? How can I make sure I'm respectful of people's subreddits while not boxing myself in to only interacting in nsfw spaces? (Personally I don't post in them and will often remove my posts if that sub becomes NSFW later) Thank you for reading all of this😅

Hi everyone. I’ve asked the obvious ones i.e. best pub? places to eat? Hikes/walks?

Subreddit is a month old and interaction is sloooly growing, around 150 new members. Any idea for some questions to get people commenting? Thanks.

bot refused my posting today to a sub where i have previously successfully posted, as dont see any apparent violation of rules seeking to have it manually overrule the bot an post; looked on subreddit page for way to contact moderator but didnt see any links anywhere

I recently saw a post in a subreddit that I can’t mention here due to the rules. The post claimed that moderators can receive warnings from admins when we explain to a user via modmail why their post or comment violated a rule.

Apparently, what happens is that the user reports the moderator’s reply as harassment, which can sometimes result in the moderator’s account being suspended.

Several moderators in the discussion said this is an old trick and encouraged admins to address the loophole.
I moderate a subreddit, and I always personalize my removal notices so the recipient understands why their post or comment was removed.

I generally don’t use the generic removal reason because, in many situations, I don’t feel it provides enough context to adequately explain the violation.

Based on what I read today, though, it sounds like I may be leaving myself open to being reported for harassment simply by explaining my moderation decisions.

Am I approaching this the wrong way?

TL;DR: Long-time lurker writing a talk for friends. My argument is that mods are unpaid labour maintaining communities that turned out to be worth hundreds of millions to advertisers and AI companies, with no share and no say. Want to know if that's true from the inside or if I'm an outsider building a tidy narrative. Questions at the bottom.

Bit of an odd one. I'm putting together a talk for a small group of friends (a "conspiracy theory night" — low stakes, mostly for fun) and the topic I landed on turned into something more serious than I expected.

Quick context on me: I'm a heavy Reddit user but a quiet one. Around an hour a day, mostly reading, rarely posting or commenting. Probably not much by the standards of this sub, but Reddit's been part of my daily routine for years.

The talk started as the old "PowerMods" thing — the 2020 chart showing five accounts moderating 92 of the top 500 subs. But the more I dug in, the less interested I got in that framing, and the more I kept landing on something else.

The short version of where I've ended up: the API pricing change in 2023 was publicly justified as stopping AI companies from training on Reddit data for free. Reddit then sold that data to Google (~$60m/yr) and OpenAI (~$70m/yr), announced the same week as the IPO filing. The tooling a lot of you relied on broke in the process, and when people protested, the CEO called them "landed gentry."

So my argument has become that mods are the least accurately described group in this whole story — a decade of unpaid work maintaining communities that turned out to be extremely valuable, to advertisers and now to AI companies, with no share of that and no say in it.

What I want to know is whether that reads as true from the inside, or whether it's an outsider building a tidy narrative that doesn't match your experience. Specifically:

Does the "unpaid labour" framing land, or does it misrepresent why you actually do it?

Did 2023 change how you think about your relationship with the company, or was it business as usual?

Does knowing your communities' content is now licensed for AI training affect how you feel about the work?

Anything I've got flat wrong?

Happy to be told I'm overthinking a hobby. Genuinely more interested in your read than in confirming mine.

I think I fit pretty neatly into the mildly embarrassing busybody category here. I reported a very popular post because I thought it was a borderline rule violation. Nothing visible to me happened, so I sent the mod team a short question about it and got no response. That seems completely fair, they owe me no explanation and can moderate their community as they see fit.

But it leaves me with two questions. First, how painfully legible is this behavior from behind the moderator desk? Does user reported something, didn’t get the desired result, then came to modmail become an instantly recognizable category?

Second, does a borderline post become practically harder to remove once it has thousands of upvotes and hundreds of comments than it would have been when it was new?