Moderator (Subreddit Mod)

A moderator, or "mod," is a redditor who volunteers their time to create, guide, and maintain one or more of Reddit's communities (subreddits). Moderators are unpaid volunteers, not Reddit employees, and they are responsible only for the specific communities they oversee. Their duties include setting and enforcing community rules, removing content that violates those rules, approving or rejecting posts and comments, managing wiki pages and flair, and handling user reports. Mods configure automated tools and bots to help manage high-volume communities and shape each subreddit's tone and standards.

A moderator's authority is limited to their own communities: they can remove content from a community's feed but cannot delete it from the site entirely, and they have no special powers elsewhere on Reddit. Mods themselves remain subject to the Reddit Rules and the Moderator Code of Conduct and can be banned like any other user for violations. This volunteer model is central to how Reddit scales across hundreds of thousands of communities, but it has also been a recurring source of tension, most visibly during the June 2023 API-pricing protests, when thousands of moderators took their communities private over changes affecting third-party moderation tools.