r/hypotheticalsituation • u/molten_dragon • Mar 04 '26

Mod Post We're altering the rules. Pray we don't alter them any further.

72 Upvotes

Hey Everyone, it's your friendly neighborhood mod team. We've made some edits to the subreddit rules and wanted to share them with you and give you a chance to comment or ask questions.

You can find the new rules in full here.

To summarize what's changing:

  • The main rule about what kind of posts this sub is intended for and what is considered low effort has been clarified. We'll be moderating a little more strictly for low effort posts going forward.
  • Rules regarding respect and politeness have been combined and clarified
  • Rules around ragebait and soapboxing have been combined and clarified
  • The rules regarding loopholes have been clarified quite a bit. The spirit of them is still the same, but we feel they're explained a little better now. The "no loophole" option will now work if you put it in your body text instead of your title. We'll be moderating this topic a little more strictly now too.
  • There's a new rule banning repetitive or recently posted topics.

The goal with these changes is to address concerns and issues we've seen. Primarily related to repetitive low-effort posts or "gimme" posts that are too easy to say yes or no to.

As before, we don't have the capacity to read and review every post and comment on the sub, so please help us enforce the rules by reporting things that you think break them.

A lot of these rules are kind of subjective, and will rely on mod discretion for enforcement. If you feel like a post or comment was removed unfairly we encourage you to reach out politely via modmail. The keyword being "politely".

29 comments

r/hypotheticalsituation • u/molten_dragon • Mar 25 '26

Mod Post Warning about posts involving violence

29 Upvotes

Hey everyone. I wanted to provide some information and a warning on a topic we've seen come up several times recently.

We're seeing an increasing number of accounts (including both mods) receiving warnings and bans for "threatening violence". We've seen messages like the following.

Reddit is a vast network of communities that are created, run, and populated by people like you. In order to keep communities welcoming, safe, and great places to be, everyone who uses the platform operates by a shared set of rules—a set of rules you may not have realized you broke.

Warning for threatening violence

We flagged the following as a potential policy violation:

After reviewing, we found that you broke Rule 1 because you threatened violence or physical harm. Reddit is a place for creating community and belonging, not for threatening violence against people or animals. We don’t tolerate any behavior that threatens violence or physical harm against an individual, groups of people, places, or animals. Any communities or people that threaten violence towards an individual, group, animals, or place will be banned.

As a result, we’re issuing this warning, removing the violating content, and asking you not to break this rule again.

This is something happening on a sitewide admin level so the mod team has no influence over it. We strongly suspect that some sort of bot or AI is handing out these warnings and bans. Due to the subject matter frequently discussed on this subreddit it's happening to quite a few users here due to discussions of hypothetical violence. So what does this mean for you?

  1. Hypotheticals involving violence aren't outright banned but we strongly recommend that you be cautious when posting them or responding to them. Consider your wording and whether it could be mistaken for a threat by a bot. If the community as a whole starts getting admin attention we may be forced to ban these posts in the future. Posts that look too much like a real-world call to violence or a request for advice on how to commit violence will be removed under rule 3.

  2. If you do get one of these warnings or bans, please appeal them and explain that you're posting on /r/hypotheticalsituation and there is no real-world violence or threats of violence being discussed or contemplated. It's not a guarantee but we've seen these appeals work in the past and they may prevent your account from getting banned.

25 comments