Dictionary

modmail en · NOUN

Etymology

From mod + mail.

Meanings

1. (uncountable) A messaging system on Reddit and similar discussion sites, used for communication between moderators and other users.
   • We used this modmail feature to contact the moderators thereafter. 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:
   • They asked for simple things like updates to their “modmail,” the internal message tool that moderators use to manage their groups. 2018, Jeremy Heimans, Henry Timms, New Power: How Power Works in Our Hyperconnected World—and How to Make It Work for You, Doubleday, →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. 2018, Christine Lagorio-Chafkin, We Are the Nerds: The Birth and Tumultuous Life of Reddit, the Internet’s Culture Laboratory, Piatkus, →ISBN:
2. (countable) A message sent through modmail.
   • 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.” 2019, J. Nathan Matias, “The Civic Labor of Volunteer Moderators Online”, in Social Media + Society, →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. 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:
   • 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, 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:

Forms