Biography
Laura Nestler is a community-operations executive who joined Reddit as vice president of community and has since been identified in professional listings as executive vice president of community. Before Reddit, she served as global head of community at the language-learning company Duolingo and spent nearly nine years at the review platform Yelp, building a career focused on community strategy at growth-stage technology companies.
At Reddit, Nestler leads the team responsible for the company's relationship with its communities and moderators, including community governance, international community strategy, and programs supporting the volunteer moderators who run individual subreddits. Reddit's reliance on unpaid moderators is a defining and sometimes contentious feature of the platform, and Nestler's role sits at the intersection of that dependence and the company's commercial objectives.
Nestler has spoken publicly about the centrality of moderators to Reddit's functioning, including a widely quoted remark that Reddit cannot survive without its moderators. Such statements have taken on particular weight in light of the 2023 dispute over third-party application access, when thousands of subreddits went private in protest and the working relationship between the company and its moderators became a subject of national coverage.
Her position is best understood within Reddit's ongoing effort to balance the autonomy and goodwill of its volunteer communities against the demands of operating as a public company. Coverage of Nestler centers on community strategy and governance rather than on personal controversy. As an executive bridging the company and its moderators, she is a relevant figure for understanding how Reddit has sought to manage moderator relations in the period during and after the API conflict and through its transition to public ownership.