Reddiquette
Also called: reddit etiquette, reddiquette rules
Definition
Reddiquette is Reddit's informal etiquette guide, written by users and hosted in Reddit's help center. It covers how to post, vote and behave, such as reading community rules first and never asking for upvotes. It is guidance, not the enforced Reddit Rules.
Reddiquette is the etiquette guide for Reddit. Reddit's help center introduces it as "an informal expression of the values of many Reddit users, as written by users themselves," and asks people to follow it as best they can. It is separate from the Reddit Rules, which are the sitewide rules Reddit's admins enforce, and from each community's own subreddit rules.
What it says
The guide has a "please do" list and a "please don't" list. Highlights that matter most day to day:
Please do
- Remember the human. Would you say it to the person's face?
- Read a community's rules before posting; they are usually in the sidebar.
- Keep titles factual. Post to the most appropriate community.
- Search for duplicates before posting.
- Vote: upvote what contributes, downvote what does not or is off-topic.
- Link to the original source of content.
Please don't
- Downvote acceptable content just because you dislike it, or mass downvote someone's posts.
- Vote based on who posted rather than what they posted.
- Report posts just because you don't like them.
- Hint at asking for votes ("Is this front page worthy?").
- Run polls with votes. Reddiquette says these are unreliable "because of vote fuzzing."
- Send messages asking people to vote for your submission. Reddiquette says this "will result in a ban from the admins."
- Post someone's personal information, or start flame wars.
- Take moderator positions where your profession or employer creates a direct conflict of interest.
Why it matters for marketers
Reddiquette is the closest thing Reddit has to a written description of what redditors expect, and most of it is about not treating Reddit as a billboard. Moderators lean on its spirit when they remove promotional content that technically fits the rules.
The parts that bite brands:
- Vote solicitation. "Upvote if this helped!" in a company post, or a Slack message asking the team to upvote, is exactly what reddiquette prohibits, and coordinated voting crosses into vote manipulation, which the Reddit Rules do enforce.
- Conflicts of interest. An employee moderating the main subreddit for their product category is the kind of conflict reddiquette warns about.
- Original source. Posting a blog summary of someone else's research, with your ads on it, is what the guide asks people not to do.
For specific self-promotion norms, see our guide to Reddit self-promotion rules.
Example
A SaaS company shares its annual report on a subreddit with the title "You won't believe what we found." It gets removed for clickbait. They repost with a factual title ("Survey of 1,200 freelancers: median hourly rate by country, with raw data") and a summary in the body. The second version stays up and gets discussed.
Frequently asked questions
Is reddiquette enforced?
Not directly. It is guidance. But parts of it overlap with the enforced Reddit Rules (such as vote manipulation and posting personal information), and many subreddit rules are based on it.
Is it against reddiquette to promote my business?
Reddiquette itself focuses on behavior like vote solicitation and source linking. Self-promotion limits mostly come from Reddit's spam policy and each community's rules.
Where is reddiquette?
It is published in Reddit's help center, with translations in several languages. The English version is the canonical one.