How reddit works

Over the past 15 months, reddit has tripled in size. Since last May, we’ve grown from 7 million monthly unique visitors to 21.5 million. Our pageviews have exploded 4x to a staggering 1.6 billion pages served per month.

This growth brings new diversity, new opportunities, and new challenges to our communities. There are now over 6,500 subreddits with over 100 subscribers. As we welcome new members into our communities, I'd like to take this opportunity to clarify how reddit works and what role moderators and admins play in the process.

The most important fact is that reddit is not a single community; it's an engine for creating communities.

A subreddit is a class of online community, just like mailing lists, forums, and chatrooms are. Each of the thousands of subreddits is a distinct community with its own purpose, standards, and readership. Subreddits are the secret to reddit's growth. As communities have scaled up, more focused ones have branched off of popular topics and posting practices. /r/AskReddit was created to consolidate and move question threads off of  /r/reddit.com. Later, /r/IAMA and /r/DoesAnybodyElse were both created to feature types of popular threads from /r/AskReddit.

Every community on reddit starts when a redditor creates it. The creator becomes the first subscriber and the first moderator of the new subreddit.

Moderators [M] are redditors who create new communities or are added to existing ones. They can:

• remove abusive, inappropriate, or spammy posts from their subreddit
• change the visual style and add content to the sidebar
• respond to feedback and requests through shared moderator mail
• add new moderators and remove more junior moderators

Moderators have built the finest communities on reddit and work hard to keep them vital. The moderators of each community decide how to moderate and who to include on their team. Some are very hands-off, while some define specific criteria for appropriate uses of their community. It is important to note that admins do not choose who moderates a subreddit or control how moderation takes place.

Subreddits are a free market. Anyone can create a subreddit and decide how it is run. If you disagree with how a subreddit is moderated, it’s good to first reach out to the team directly through moderator mail. Singling out moderators through reddit creates more drama than constructive change (reminder: posting personal information will not be tolerated). If you are unable to resolve your grievances with the current moderation team of a subreddit, the best response is often to create a competitor and see if the community follows you. In the rare cases of mismoderation, some of the most successful subreddits ever have cropped up overnight in response.

Moderators are constantly pushing the boundaries and inventing new ways to use reddit, on both community and technical fronts. Subreddit sidebars, user flair, the NSFW tag, link tag emoticons, and the /r/IAMA verification system were all invented by the community before being built into the core reddit code. Subreddit mods continue to invent crazy, awesome things to do with their communities. The /r/fffffffuuuuuuuuuuuu mods recently ran an awesome CSS experiment where a trollface would slowly appear at the bottom of the page as you downvoted more rage comics. The current style of /r/circlejerk (screenshot, sfw) is one of the most incredible uses of subreddit CSS we’ve ever seen. This experimentation and creativity makes reddit communities some of the most vibrant ones on the Internet.

Admins [A] are employees of reddit. We:

• maintain the code, organization, and infrastructure
• develop new features and merge community contributions
• handle policy violations and site-wide abuse
• keep the lights blinking

As admins, our calling is supporting reddit's communities to do awesome things. In the majority of cases the best way accomplish this is by granting subreddits as much autonomy as possible. We encourage moderators to push the boundaries and try new things. However, there are limits. Our prime directive is that we will not intervene unless something attacks the structural integrity of the greater reddit community.

On a moderator level, and a meta reddit level, the best way that we can resolve community issues is through good communication and transparency. Admin and moderator intervention is wasteful because it's disruptive to both us and the community. It takes up time that can be spent building our communities further. We deeply respect the role moderators play in their communities, and we don't use admin ability to override that unless it is absolutely necessary.

When subreddits grow and mature, they gain greater exposure to ignorance and abuse. Even the largest subreddits are still working with tools that were designed for communities orders of magnitude smaller. Despite this, smart and dedicated moderation teams have expanded subreddits to over half a million subscribers. We recognize the need for new tools for these subreddits to continue to thrive.

There are problems that good communication alone cannot solve, and for those the best solution is to create features that allow for transparent self-correction. We have some ideas about features to add, such as making it easier to find subreddits, making the site friendlier for new users, and allowing moderators to make decisions more democratically. We’re keen on building the features communities need, but we realize that we’re only one voice in this discussion. Your ideas and thoughts will inform where reddit goes next.

I'd like to take a moment to celebrate the communities we’ve built together. Thank you, moderators, for your persistence and creativity in building incredible communities on the site. As reddit continues to grow, we are committed to building our systems and policies to support you. Thank you all for making reddit awesome every day. reddit is proof that everyone's contributions, from creating a community to  simply clicking a vote button, can have a massive effect.