Please do:

• Search for dupes before posting something. That said, sometimes bad timing, a bad title, or just plain bad luck can cause an interesting story to fail to get noticed. Feel free to post something again if you feel that the earlier posting didn't get the attention it deserved and you think you can do better.
• Post links directly to interesting things. Because reddit is a meritocracy, old content and some self-promotion are okay, but submitting content from only a select few sources is discouraged.
• Put the file type at the end of the title if it is something other than html or text, like [pdf] or [video].
• Add a link to a direct version of a media file where possible, if the article links to a streamed version.
• Link to canonical and persistent URLs where possible, not entry pages where the content may temporarily feature. In particular, use the "permalink" for blog entries, not the blog's index page.
• If you are going to downvote a post, it helps the poster improve their post quality if you tell them in the comments why you downvote it. However, you only need to do that if you really think your criticism can help the poster improve.
• Read the new page and vote on it: someone has to! Regard it as a public service.
• Actually read an article before you mod it! This sounds trivial but it seems that it is becoming more and more common to mod articles based just on the titles. This behaviour considerably harms the system.

Please don't:

• Post inane comments. "LOL very funny haha"-type comments will be mercilessly downmodded into oblivion.
• Downvote comments just because you disagree with them. You should downvote comments that are uninformative or offtopic.
• Linkjack stories: linking to stories via blog posts that add nothing extra.
• Post hoaxes. If snopes.com has already declared something false, you probably shouldn't be submitting it to Reddit.
• Flood reddit with a lot of stories in a short span of time. By doing this you monopolize a shared resource - the new queue. Not friendly.
• Complain about too many stories about xyz. Use the recommendation system.
• Complain about a story being old. Reddit is about interesting stuff, not new stuff only. Just hide the story.
• Moderate a story based on your opinion of its source. Quality of content, not location, is what matters.
• Wreak vengeance on another user just because they dissed your contributions.
• Speculate endlessly on why you have been downvoted - just accept you got it wrong and move on.
• Complain when a duplicate story finds more success than the original. Posting a link to the original is okay, since earlier comments may be of interest.
• Write titles in ALL CAPS.
• Editorialize in the headlines.
• Announce your mods to the world. Comments like "great link" or "modded up" are not terribly informative.
• Conduct polls using posts. If you feel you must use Reddit to conduct a poll do it using a comment. Create a self referencing post and then add a comment for readers to mod up or down based on their answer to your poll question. Also, be sure to indicate in the title of your post that the polls is being conducted using comments. Including something like "(use comments to vote)" in the title would probably be sufficient.
• Hawk snake oil.
• Hurt small animals or children.

DISCUSSION POINTS:

tofocsend: what's wrong with editorializing in the headline? Certainly the voting patterns don't support the idea that redditors dislike editorializing.

gwenhwyfaer: re the last please-do - what if you're downmodding it in order to train the 'recommended' filter - eg. because it shows a gory operation and you're really squeamish?

LaurieCheers: Sounds like a legitimate reason to downmod. So add the comment "Eww! That's horrible!"

If I'm required to provide an explanation every time I give something a negative rating, I'll simply stop doing it ... which will make reddit less useful for me, and presumably for everyone else as well.

jmelesky: I agree with the above anonymous comment -- requiring justification for downmods is cumbersome, and above and beyond the needs of etiquette. It might be more appropriate if you're downmodding something in the new queue, though, since that downmod might well prevent it from showing up on the main page. Once it hits "hot", though, i think all bets are off.

spez: I think if the submitter is clearly new to the site and is unknowingly inviting downvotes by, for example, submitting links very quickly, letting them know the error of their ways is helpful. Should you provide commentary for every down-vote? Of course not, that's tedious and defeats the purpose of having the simple down-vote interface.

kmactane: Can we get a better definition of "linkjacked/linkjacking"? When I go to linkjacked.com, it simply redirects me to this page on reddit.com, which in turn simply has a rather uninformative image. Is the term meant to indicate stuff like the site that reprinted an entire Forbes article recently, or something else?

dennis moran: linkjacked.com is 404 now. I replaced it with the urbandictionary definition, which specifically mentions reddit.

judgmentalist: Linkjacking has referred to a few things. I've heard it referring to plain wholesale duplication of content from another source like that Forbes article, but usually it's a link to a tiny blog description and a link to the website of interest. This inserts an only mildly irritating page apparently designed to generate adsense revenue. What level of content addition is actually necessary is debatable. It's just something to avoid. Reddit doesn't have any punishing Gods. And, imho, moderation should be done for whatever reason you please. I'd like to suggest that people vote according to whether they were glad they'd seen a certain link, and not so much what they'd like others to see. But it's not the biggest deal so long as you aren't using multiple accounts. Reddit has enough of a population that it can survive a few people not contributing to the group filter in this preferred way. For, you know, my purposes. blah blah blah. 'Scuse me.

kmactane: Thanks for enlightening me, Judgmentalist. It seems almost like the "... or link to stories via blog posts that add nothing extra" part was intended to be the definition I was seeking, except that I misread it as meaning "please don't do X or Y".

Perhaps we could rephrase it to: (Please don't...) "Linkjack stories, by linking to blog posts that add nothing extra. Instead, please link directly to the actual/original source." (Or words to that effect.)

mesoanarchy Aha! The moment of clarity finally arrived. Thank you judgmentalist for your lucid explanation of linkjacking. I have, as you may or may not know, gone round and round with other redditers (redditarians? lol) about this subject. kmactane just provided the answer. The definition of linkjacking is clear, as are all the reddiquette points. However, some folks want to fit the definition of linkjacking to their idea of what they want the definition to be, rather than accepting the definition as is. If the definition of linkjacking is altered to read any other way than what it is now, then the source of the article becomes more important than the article itself. I don't know that anyone here, or anyone who may join Reddit who wants to participate in a site that involves itself in inconsequential flame wars over peripheral aspects of the presented news. Thanks.

davidmccabe: Just so it's clear, is it alright to resubmit one's own submissions with an improved title? If so, how long should one wait before doing that?

akkartik: Just don't flood the new queue. If the old one doesn't have any comments consider deleting it before resubmitting. Aside from that I think anything is fine.

akkartik: I often downmod without reading articles. It's because the down arrow is easier to click on than the 'hide' link, it's vertically aligned. I've pointed this out to the reddit folks before. You can't expect everybody to click on every story on reddit, so if you don't make hiding easy you will get de facto mods.

I suppose you could also argue that voting without reading helps train the recommendation engine. If I don't want to watch movies I should let reddit know.

tss: "This sounds trivial but it seems that it is becoming more and more common to mod articles based just on the titles" - this is whining, not advice! Also, what happened to "Don't hurt small children or animals"?

joelthelion: In the long run downmodding to train the filter (ie because you're not interested) should not be a problem, because if the content is valuable, the number of up mods should compensate. It's only a problem because reddit doesn't have enough readers yet :)

robotninja: I would suggest also adding "please DON'T use unnecessary adjectives in your titles (eg. amazing, incredible, stupefying, unbelievable, etc)". At best, they just take up space and don't add anything of value. At worst, they're misleading and/or annoying. The whole point of reddit to to let others determine if they think the link is as amazing/incredible/unbelievable as you do.

indigoviolet: Can a link to reddiquette be placed more prominently on the front page/comments pages? Either because it was a long weekend in the US or because there was a large influx of new members from somewhere, I noticed an unusual excess of inane and stupid comments. Also, I really hope that new measures to combat this sort of thing (comment karma, a comment length filter) are coming soon -- once you lose the community, there won't be a need for them. I'd love to have a thread on how to achieve this aspect (keeping the discussion interesting) better, but it would be best if one of the staff posted it.

last updated 8 months ago #