modmail

English

Etymology

From mod +‎ mail.

Noun

modmail (countable and uncountable, plural modmails)

1. (uncountable) A messaging system on Reddit used for communication between moderators and other Redditors.
   • 2018, Jeremy Heimans, Henry Timms, New Power: How Power Works in Our Hyperconnected World—and How to Make It Work for You, Doubleday, →ISBN:

     They asked for simple things like updates to their “modmail,” the internal message tool that moderators use to manage their groups.

   • 2018, Christine Lagorio-Chafkin, We Are the Nerds: The Birth and Tumultuous Life of Reddit, the Internet’s Culture Laboratory, Piatkus, →ISBN:

     She mostly kept to protocol when issues arose here and elsewhere, trying to message moderators through modmail, the internal Reddit mail system, where she was sometimes known as Alex.

   • 2020, Koustuv Saha, Sindhu Kiranmai Ernala, Sarmistha Dutta, Eva Sharma, Munmun De Choudhury, “Understanding Moderation in Online Mental Health Communities”, in Gabriele Meiselwitz, editor, Social Computing and Social Media. Participation, User Experience, Consumer Experience, and Applications of Social Computing, Springer Nature Switzerland AG, →ISBN, page 95:

     We used this modmail feature to contact the moderators thereafter.

2. (countable) A message sent through modmail.
   • 2019, Eshwar Chandrasekharan, Chaitrali Gandhi, Matthew Wortley Mustelier, Eric Gilbert, “Crossmod: A Cross-Community Learning-based System to Assist Reddit Moderators”, in Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, →DOI, page x:13:

     In addition to reporting comments, Crossmod is designed to support a range of other functionalities: to send alerts to moderators in case of particularly sensitive topics (in the form of modmails), or to proactively remove comments that garner very high abuse scores computed by the pre-trained machine learning models described in Section 4.3.

   • 2019, J. Nathan Matias, “The Civic Labor of Volunteer Moderators Online”, in Social Media + Society, →DOI:

     Yet they still faced pressure from many their community to join the blackout: “we eventually released the statement after we received dozens of modmails and posts on both subreddits.”

   • 2023, Sarah A. Gilbert, “Towards Intersectional Moderation: An Alternative Model of Moderation Built on Care and Power”, in Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, →DOI:

     Meanwhile, the team discussed the reports as the modmails flooded in and continued to collaborate on the post about the history of police violence.