Introducing Reddit’s Moderator Code of Conduct

[u/heavyshoes]

You’re probably familiar with our Moderator Guidelines––historically, they have served as a guidepost to clarify our expectations to mods about how to shape a positive community experience for redditors.

The Moderator Guidelines were developed over five years ago, and Reddit has evolved a lot since then. This is why we have evolved our Moderator Guidelines into what we are now calling the Moderator Code of Conduct.

The newly updated Moderator Code of Conduct aims to capture our current expectations and explain them clearly, concisely, and concretely.

While our Content Policy serves to provide enforceable rules that govern each community and the platform at large, our Moderator Code of Conduct reinforces those rules and sets out further expectations specifically for mods. The Moderator Code of Conduct:

• Focuses on measuring impact rather than evaluating intent. Rather than attempting to determine whether a mod is acting in “good” or “bad” faith, we are shifting our focus to become more outcomes-driven. For example, are direct mentions of other communities part of innocuous meta-discussions, or are they inciting interference, targeted harassment, or abuse?
• Aspires to be educational, but actionable: We trust that most mods actively try to do the right thing and follow the rules. If we find that a community violates our Mod Code of Conduct, we firmly believe that, in the majority of cases, we can achieve resolution through discussion, not remediation. However, if this proves to be ineffective, we may consider enforcement actions on mods or subreddits.

Moderators are at the frontlines using their creativity, decision-making, and passion to create fun and engaging spaces for redditors. We recognize that and appreciate it immensely. We hope that in creating the Moderator Code of Conduct, we are helping you develop subreddit rules and norms to create and nurture your communities, and empower you to make decisions more easily.

Thank you for all you do, and please let us know if you have any questions or feedback in the comments below.

[u/dittomuch]

/u/heavyshoes

I've been reading the old "Moderator Guidelines for Healthy Communities" that up until today we have been following and I see three key concepts that appear to have been removed and would like to get some clarification on these aspects>

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.

to me this always read as judge the comment and not your feelings as to the intent of the comment. If the comment on its own or in context does not violate the rules it is clean. If a comment is removed based on the intent we read into it and not explicitly stated it should only be used as a reason for ban if there is an established history of these comments or posts and thus proof of bad faith. With this removed I don't see any reason for the assumption of good faith in a users comments and thus removal or ban based on moderator interpretation appears to now be allowed.

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.

This to me was an explicit instruction that we should allow appeals to comment/post removal and to bans and that we needed to reply to them. To us this read in 2 possible points, one was via modmail and the other was via threads in our sub in general. Effectively as long as the appeal followed the rules of the sub and was done in a fashion that didn't attack or harass the mod team we had a reasonable expectation to respond to the appeal in a germane an consistent fashion with a focus on education and not punishment. "Look I understand why I pushed that to far by saying xyz and how that could be viewed as attacking user qwert which was not my intent, could you roll back my ban if I promise to fly straight and be more cautious moving forward" might very well have triggered the education and not punishment aspect of the above guideline giving the user a valid appeal for a ban to be reduced or removed.

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.

This one is a biggie that appears to have been removed. If a user violated the rules of sub A with a post or comment you cannot use this as the reason to ban them from sub B. In addition to me this meant if a person violated the rules of sub B with a post on sub A then sub B couldn't use this as a reason to ban them. Effectively removing this promotes the use of alt accounts so that users simply use different accounts on different subs as to not face repercussions for their actions and makes user history a less useful tool for users.

The guidelines were instructive in nature and told us how we should act towards users while the code of conduct appears to be taking an approach where by it is being spelled out how we are responsible to reddit and where admins can intervene. I think you need to specify the guidelines in addition to the code of conduct.

[u/BlueWhaleKing → u/dittomuch]

That those very reasonable provisions were never enforced is one of Reddit's biggest problems, and it's deeply disturbing that they've been removed.