Reddit Request (r/redditrequest)

Reddit Request is the official process, run through the community r/redditrequest, by which a user can ask to take over a subreddit whose moderators have gone inactive. If no moderator action has occurred in a community for 30 days or more, another redditor may post a formal request to become a moderator; an automated bot and, where needed, Reddit staff review the request against published criteria before granting or denying it.

The process matters because subreddits are run by volunteers who can disappear, leaving communities leaderless, vulnerable to spam, or effectively abandoned. Reddit Request provides an orderly, rules-based path to revive such communities rather than letting them rot or be seized informally. It also illustrates the platform's layered authority: ordinary moderation is delegated to volunteers, but the ultimate power to assign or reassign control of a community rests with Reddit, which uses inactivity thresholds and a transparent queue to make those decisions reviewable.