Raid

A raid is a coordinated influx of users from one community into another with hostile intent, such as flooding it with off-topic, offensive, or disruptive content, harassing its members, or mass-voting to overwhelm normal activity. On Reddit, raids are a form of intergroup conflict in which members of an antagonistic subreddit organize, often after a thread or community is linked, to descend on a target and disrupt it. Raids overlap heavily with brigading; the distinction is mainly one of emphasis, with "raid" stressing the en masse invasion and takeover of a space rather than vote manipulation alone.

Academic research has shown that such conflicts are highly concentrated: a Stanford-led study reported that about one percent of roughly 36,000 examined subreddits were responsible for the large majority of these intergroup attacks, with active members of a community typically instigating raids that less-active members then carry out. Raids tended to cluster around controversial, high-profile communities. Reddit's Content Policy prohibits the harassment and coordinated targeting that raids involve, and communities found organizing them can be banned. The term also appears in gentler fan contexts (for example, fans "taking over" a personality's subreddit), but in moderation discussions it denotes deliberately hostile, disruptive incursions.