Our sub has a no-news rule, and every so often someone discovers that the mod team posts curated news and decides they’ve caught us in a contradiction. So here’s the full story, with the context that a one-line rule can’t carry.

The math that forced the rule

Without the rule, a sub our size would see something like a hundred news submissions a day. Not because a hundred members suddenly became news enthusiasts — because news is the cheapest content there is for brands, agencies, and SEO accounts to post. Grab a headline, add nothing, collect karma, build the account, funnel the traffic. Multiply that by every marketing team that’s discovered Reddit, and the front page stops being a community and starts being a wire service with comments.

So we stopped it. That’s the entire origin of the rule: volume and spam, not a philosophical position on news.

But the community still needs news

Killing news entirely would mean punishing 500,000 members for the behavior of the accounts that abused the format. The topic moves fast; people are here partly to keep up with it. So the mod team took on the job of curating it manually — reading the flood so you don’t have to, and posting the handful of items that actually merit discussion.

For comparison, look at other subs in our space, like r/bigseo and r/TechSEO, which have similar restrictions but no mod curation. The predictable result: the news discussion just doesn’t happen there. We think our arrangement — restricted submissions, curated feed — is the better trade, and it’s real work someone does by hand, unpaid, so the community keeps the benefit without the spam.

What the pattern actually looked like

Some context on who the rule was written for. These weren’t confused newcomers. We had users we reminded five or six times that posting their own coverage of industry news was marketing — the same content they were simultaneously pushing on X and LinkedIn as part of an explicit promotion strategy. Reddit was just the third distribution channel, with the bonus of looking organic.

And here’s the tell: once news posting stopped paying, most of those accounts stopped engaging with the sub entirely. Not “found other ways to contribute” — vanished. If the interest in the community had ever been genuine, removing one posting format wouldn’t have ended it. The rule didn’t drive away contributors; it revealed who was never contributing in the first place.

So no, it isn’t ironic, its just sadly practical

“Rules for me but not for thee” only works as a gotcha if mods curating news and brands marketing through news are the same activity. They aren’t. One is unpaid maintenance work that keeps the community informed; the other is a distribution strategy with a karma bonus. The rule was always aimed at the second, and the curation is how the first survives it.

If you genuinely think a story deserves a post, modmail is open, and plenty of curated items start as user suggestions. That’s the good-faith path, and it works.

Having to point out that mods need to engage, maintain, grow and inform subs is sad but sometimes modding subs is like herding sheep, especially if people think they’re owed something. Some people think they share the best information or that a sub will fall apart without them (which is never true and Mod sponsored vacations are a great way to demonstrate this when things get extreme). – but its kind of a childish and simple opinion to share or hold…