Today’s announcement is about making reddit the best community platform it can be: tutorials for new moderators, a strengthened community team, and a policy change to further protect your privacy.
What started as 1 reddit community is now up to over 9,000 active communities that range from originals like /r/programming and/r/science to more niche communities like /r/redditlaqueristas and /r/goats. Nearly all of that has come from intrepid individuals who create and moderate this vast network of communities. I know, because I was reddit’s first “community manager” back when we had just one (/r/reddit.com) but you all have far outgrown those humble beginnings.
In creating hundreds of thousands of communities over this decade, you’ve learned a lot along the way, and we have, too; we’re rolling out improvements to help you create the next 9,000 active communities and beyond!
Check Out the First Mod Tutorial Today!
We’ve started a series of mod tutorials, which will help anyone from experienced moderators to total neophytes learn how to most effectively use our tools (which we’re always improving) to moderate and grow the best community they can. Moderators can feel overwhelmed by the tasks involved in setting up and building a community. These tutorials should help reduce that learning curve, letting mods learn from those who have been there and done that.
New Team & New Hires
Jessica (/u/5days) has stepped up to lead the community team for all of reddit after managing the redditgifts community for 5 years. Lesley (/u/weffey) is coming over to build better tools to support our community managers who help all of our volunteer reddit moderators create great communities on reddit. We’re working through new policies to help you all create the most open and wide-reaching platform we can. We’re especially excited about building more mod tools to let software do the hard stuff when it comes to moderating your particular community. We’re striving to build the robots that will give you more time to spend engaging with your community — spend more time discussing the virtues of cooking with spam, not dealing with spam in your subreddit.
Protecting Your Digital Privacy
Last year, we missed a chance to be a leader in social media when it comes to protecting your privacy — something we’ve cared deeply about since reddit’s inception. At our recent all hands company meeting, this was something that we all, as a company, decided we needed to address.
No matter who you are, if a photograph, video, or digital image of you in a state of nudity, sexual excitement, or engaged in any act of sexual conduct, is posted or linked to on reddit without your permission, it is prohibited on reddit. We also recognize that violent personalized images are a form of harassment that we do not tolerate and we will remove them when notified. As usual, the revised Privacy Policy will go into effect in two weeks, on March 10, 2015.
We’re so proud to be leading the way among our peers when it comes to your digital privacy and consider this to be one more step in the right direction. We’ll share how often these takedowns occur in our yearly privacy report.
We made reddit to be the world’s best platform for communities to be informed about whatever interests them. We’re learning together as we go, and today’s changes are going to help grow reddit for the next ten years and beyond.
We’re so grateful and excited to have you join us on this journey.
— Jessica, Ellen, Alexis & the rest of team reddit
