Why We Built Reddit Jail
The idea is small on purpose: every Reddit post gets a URL, and right next to it, Reddit Jail opens up a place where everyone gets a chance to chime in! It’s a second, independent comment thread that lives on our own servers, under our own moderation, with our own accounts. Nothing about it requires Reddit’s cooperation, and nothing about it can be switched off by a subreddit’s mod team or Reddit’s own admins, because none of them have any access to it.
What actually happens under the hood
Sign in with Google, claim a display handle, and that handle is what everyone sees: not your email, not your Reddit username, nothing that connects back to your Reddit account at all. That’s not an accident: the entire point is that a subreddit ban, a sitewide suspension, or a shadowban has zero effect on your ability to use Reddit Jail, because there’s nothing linking the two accounts for Reddit to act on.
From there it works like a normal comment section: reply, upvote, downvote, report content that breaks the rules. The rules themselves are public (see our Community Guidelines) and short: no spam, no harassment, no hate, no illegal content. That’s the entire list of what gets a comment removed, and every removal comes with a reason attached to it, not a silent disappearance.
What we’re deliberately not building
We’re not scraping Reddit’s content, impersonating Reddit, or trying to convince anyone this is Reddit. It’s its own place, independent and unofficial, not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Reddit, Inc., that happens to organize itself around the same post URLs Reddit uses, because that’s the context people actually want to keep the conversation in.
We also don’t have a self-serve way to delete your account yet. If you want your data gone, email us and we’ll handle it by hand. That’s on our list to fix, not a permanent design decision; see the Privacy Policy for exactly what we collect and why in the meantime.
Who this is for
People who got banned from a subreddit for a bad call. People who got a sitewide suspension and are stuck in reddit.com/appeals with no idea when, or if, they’ll hear back (we wrote about exactly how that process works). People who didn’t get banned at all, but are tired of a handful of volunteer moderators being the only check on their own decisions. If Reddit isn’t going to give you a place to finish the conversation, we will.