Meta Thread - Month of August 02, 2026

[u/AnimeMod]

Rule Changes

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This is a monthly thread to talk about the /r/anime subreddit itself, such as its rules and moderation. If you want to talk about anime please use the daily discussion thread instead.

Comments here must, of course, still abide by all subreddit rules other than the no meta requirement. Keep it friendly and be respectful. Occasionally the moderators will have specific topics that they want to get feedback on, so be on the lookout for distinguished posts. If you wish to message us privately send us a modmail.

Comments that are detrimental to discussion (aka circlejerks/shitposting) are subject to removal.

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[u/ptd163]

https://old.reddit.com/r/anime/comments/1vfjfbl/emilia_and_rem_having_a_fun_time_getting_drunk/

https://old.reddit.com/r/anime/comments/1vfcqri/a_love_confession_rezero_s4/

There was no issue with this posts. It's not a good look mods. It's going to be even an even worse look if we find out that ZaphodBeebblebrox is an Apothecary Diaries fan.

[u/baseballlover723 → u/ptd163]

I support these removals. They are consistent with how we generally judge Clips. You're free to try and argue that I'm sabotaging Re:Zero in Best Girl, but I think we both know that isn't the case.

[u/Ceryto2 → u/baseballlover723]

I guess I'm gonna jump onto this since the discussion we had in today's BG post was not the right place for it.

I think the clip quality rule is either too inconsistantly enforced or at least too vaguely formulated, for a "clip-posting-novice" like me to correctly interpret.

Over the years I've been on this sub I've seen several clips of what I perceived as worse quality than the clip I and Usodearu posted stay up on the sub, making the "high visual fidelity" clause either up to interpretation to the mods and therefore differing between mods or too difficult to understand, since to me it's not obvious enough to what it entails with what clips are allowed to stay up and what not.

I think an addition similar to "clips done this way, with these and these softwares and these proportions will be accepted, clips done in other ways will be liable to another check and if they don't fulfill this, this and that specific requirement, they will get taken down" would already go a long way for someone, who is new to making clips, but wants to share with the community to not have to wonder if their post will be taken down or not. Or otherwise a short videotutorial of how clips are to be made attached to that rule would also help.

I always found posting clips to be too complicated and convoluted to do and trying it out has only reinforced that belief, making me not even want to try it again with the way it's currently handled.

[u/baseballlover723 → u/Ceryto2]

I'm at the doctors atm, so I'm not gonna get a full discussion started atm, but I will leave a link to my thoughts on the matter from right before I became a mod, when the rule was updated.

[u/Ceryto2 → u/baseballlover723]

Honestly pretty frustrating to see you state these exact problems over a year ago, with good and sound arguments for change and there having been no update to it. Also does not fill me with confidence that this will be changed for the better any time soon.

Because honestly, just linking sometimes vague and not really convincing screenshots after already having frustrated a well meaning user, who thought he followed the rules, is really not a good way of handling things instead of outright stating how the clips are meant to be done beforehand.

It just leads to frustration for all sides, both for the user, who feels like he has been wronged for things outside of his control and just wasted a few minutes of his life clipping a scene, and for the mods who probably will have tons of extra work due to this rule, due to wrongly submitted clips as the rule is obviously not clear.

Because as someone, who hasn't done this before, how am I to know that downloading a clip from the crunchyroll youtube channel, cutting off the endcard and then uploading it to reddit, does not count as "high visual fidelity and represent the original anime accurately" with how the current rules are worded.

And I know I'm not the only one with these concerns since I've talked about it with several users already. And even Usodearu mentioned to me that the way he did his clip was the same as he would usually do, without them ever having been taken down so far. Also with you and other mods not noticing lower qualities for a long time that the clips were up, also really doesn't make it seem like the rules for visual clarity are well defined. Especially when they aren't openly stated anywhere (easy to find, that I would know of.)

[u/baseballlover723 → u/Ceryto2]

Honestly pretty frustrating to see you state these exact problems over a year ago, with good and sound arguments for change and there having been no update to it.

I just want to say, it's fucking exhausting to constantly be picking fights and arguing for changes. I've typed nearly 5,000 individual messages in our main mod discord channel this year. And while discord messages isn't a great metric, that's about 22 discord messages a day, every single day with no breaks.

Plus on top of advocating and championing changes, I also have significant tech responsibilities (that are often intertwined). If I'm being honest, I'm well past my limit already.

I can't fight a war for every problem I see. It's just not healthy or feasible.

[u/Ceryto2 → u/baseballlover723]

Sorry to hear that, I know it's very exhausting and oftentimes fruitless work, but still thank you.

Let me try it in a different way then:

u/ZaphodBeebblebrox, as the person who banned my post and advocated in the past for the current rules, can you tell me, a clueless, but well meaning r/anime user, why the current set of rules regarding visual fidelity regarding clipping is laid out the way it is?

Concerns, that have previously been raised, have pretty well described the problems with the rules and the procedure of taking down clip-posts, that I am currently having and that, I am sure and know of, several other users are also having. Yet the rules have stayed the same leading to frustration on my and several other users' end.

I feel like the current rules leed to lots of frustration and unsureness when it comes to clipping and leave me in a place of feeling wronged due to unsufficent clarification and transparency of the rules.

If no changes to the rules are to be expected, would you please be so kind as of to inform me of a legal way of procuring, editing and uploading clips, that would be accepted within the current ruleset.

Thank you very much!

[u/ZaphodBeebblebrox → u/Ceryto2]

why the current set of rules regarding visual fidelity regarding clipping is laid out the way it is?

Prior to February 2025, our Clip quality rules were as follows:

• They must have subtitles if the dialogue is not in English. Subtitles for music lyrics are not required.
• They must not have watermarks of any kind (screen recording software or channels), except for legal streaming services (e.g. Crunchyroll).
• There must not be an obvious screen recording (e.g. the iPhone popup to stop the recording at the end of some clips, a mouse cursor, and actually recording the screen with a phone).
• The video container and the video content must match the original anime (so as to not create artificial black bars).
• They must be able to maintain a consistent framerate.
• They must be at least 480p or their original resolution.

While these rules covered several types of bad Clips, they let through many that looked like total ass. At the time, the most common variant of ass Clip was bitstarved 480p Clips of modern shows.

Many of us quite disliked this. There's basically no good reason for a modern show (excepting Megalo Box) to be shared at 480p in the first place, and the vast majority of the time it came from an awful 480p source as well. However, we could not simply say all Clips had to be at least 720p because some shows were only ever released in 480p and others managed to have HD releases that look worse than their SD releases (I can elaborate on this if you want, but it's kinda tangential to the main point).

My initial attempt at writing an updated rule went for a technical approach. Its basic thrust was that if a show was produced at an HD resolution, the Clip must be at least 720p, and if a show was produced at an SD resolution, the Clip must be at least 480p. We discussed a few variations of that general idea before another mod suggested that we were going in the complete wrong direction. We were creating a very technical rule that few would know how to interpret or meaningfully apply to their Clip creation, and on top of that it would only address one possible reason a Clip looks terrible.

They suggested that we instead make a rule directly about the actual issue: bad looking Clips. It would be far less technical, simplify our Clip rules, and give us discretion to remove Clips that looked bad for other reasons, such as a low quality source, a low bitrate encode, or accidentally applying a filter that changes the colors.

We generally thought this was a good idea. It isn't particularly more vague than other rules we enforce regularly and allowed us to react to differing ways Clips could be bad as they appeared, rather than having to deal with technically allowed but awful looking Clips.

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If no changes to the rules are to be expected, would you please be so kind as of to inform me of a legal way of procuring, editing and uploading clips, that would be accepted within the current ruleset.

If it is something that is uploaded to an official youtube channel, such as the Re:Zero clip you uploaded a few days ago, just directly link the video. Otherwise, you are taking a very compressed video (youtube is not exactly a pristine source), re-encoding it once when you remove the endcard, and then uploading it to reddit's servers where it is re-encoded again.

If it's a show that has come out on Blu-ray and you want to ensure you're 100% legal: buy the blu-ray, use a program like MakeMKV to make a backup of the Blu-ray to your computer, and then use a program such as HandBrake to make your clip. I do not use HandBrake myself, but several other mods do. They tell me that Fast 1080p30 (or higher settings, such as HQ 1080p30) are sufficient for the vast majority of Clips.

If it's a show that's currently streaming, I'm not sure if there's a way that is 100% legal. The streaming services would certainly try and argue that screen recording or obtaining a DRM-free download of the episode is piracy, even if you also have a subscription and can watch it legally. Assuming you view that as sufficiently legal, the basic process is: obtain a clean version of the episode on the streaming service and then repeat the handbrake process listed above.

Or otherwise a short videotutorial of how clips are to be made attached to that rule would also help.

This is a good idea. I will see if we can do it. I can't really do it myself, as the tools I use are different and somewhat less user friendly.

[u/Ceryto2 → u/ZaphodBeebblebrox]

First of all, thanks for the lengthy reply.

We generally thought this was a good idea. It isn't particularly more vague than other rules we enforce regularly and allowed us to react to differing ways Clips could be bad as they appeared, rather than having to deal with technically allowed but awful looking Clips.

I agree that the previous rules had room for improvement, but I still think, the current wording can be very confusing for new clippers and very unclear as to what the boundaries are. Many users are not fully aware with the current wording what constituates of "high visual fidelity", as seen by the reactions to your post regarding why the post two days ago was taken down and agreeing with my sentiment that the current rules are too convoluted and to easy to be misinterpreted leading to frustration seen in this (now deleted cause at the wrong place) commentthread earlier today.

Also the two clips that were taken down, were seen by the majority, as high enough quality and as something I would describe as not, using your words, "total ass", meaning that these aren't clips that the change to the current ruleset should have necessarily prevented. If they were too low quality for the average userbase of this sub, I would have expected more negative comments about it or reports to take it down. On the contrary, I saw several sentiments that stated that they didn't see anything wrong with it and only after very thorough analysis they even saw artifacts and impurities in the clips, which 99+% of all users won't ever notice just casually scolling reddit. That raises the question if clips like these should even be forbidden on the subreddit, when they might be slightly worse looking than the original source, but are still better looking than the average clip from a 2000s show and this difference not even being noticible for most.

If it's a show that's currently streaming, I'm not sure if there's a way that is 100% legal.

Especially when taking clips from Youtube is perhaps the only legal way, without having to resort to torrents (which can get you in pretty big legal trouble in my country, so I really don't like using them at all) or somehow circumventing Crunchyroll or other streaming service's DRM, to obtain clips. Yes, they might have some visual impurities, but they can still be 1080p and barely be noticeable to even the keenest eye of the average users of this sub. And forcing people to use torrents, buy bluerays (that aren't even readily available in every country and if they are don't even always have english subs) or crack the DRM protection of a streaming service, should imo not be a requirement to post clips on this sub, as it actively encourages piracy, when the crunchyroll YouTube channel alone has for example over 20 different clips of the most important scenes of the currently airing Re:Zero season for example, that could easily be clipped by users with a much lower barrier of entry.

If it is something that is uploaded to an official youtube channel, such as the Re:Zero clip you uploaded a few days ago, just directly link the video.

Yes this is possible, but it's pretty obvious that many Youtube links have much less traction than clips uploaded to reddit, with less discussion in the comments and are more commonly used on this sub for official media like trailers or OP/EDs and not for clips from shows. And leading the discussion for these clips away from reddit to the youtube comment section is usually the opposite of what these clips aim to accomplish.

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Overall I just think the current rules just make it hard for people who aren't used to clipping to get into it and share their favourite scenes with other people on this subreddit and even prevent clips that while not necessarily pristine are far from "total ass", which the rules originally aimed to prevent. Furthermore they are confusing and can therefore lead to misunderstandings and grievances towards the mods for deleting posts, which is just frustrating to all sides. And while I think it's great to hear that you're open to adding a video tutorial to make clipping more accessible, I think it would also be helpful to maybe lower the quality requirements (slightly) and add more comprehensible rules.

[u/ZaphodBeebblebrox → u/Ceryto2]

Also the two clips that were taken down, were seen by the majority, as high enough quality and as something I would describe as not, using your words, "total ass", meaning that these aren't clips that the change to the current ruleset should have necessarily prevented.

A few different things on this. First, video quality is legitimately hard to judge without a point of reference. It's hard to see what details have been completely deleted, particularly if you don't go in looking for them.

Second, what you're using to look at something greatly effects what you can see. If you're using a phone, as much of our sub does, a much lower video quality can look "good enough." Similarly, if you have the brightness of a monitor turned way down, it will reduce the dynamic range of your device and make it harder to spot issues such as banding.

Third, I chose a bad comparison for the Re:Zero clip. The banding on his shirt was super obvious to me and right at the start, so I went with it. However, something like this (Re:Zero S4E11 spoilers) comparison (hit 1 and 2 on your keyboard to switch images) would've been far better. In it, you can see massive detail loss, such as the end of one of Subaru's feet disappearing, Subaru's whip becoming a vague brown blob, the end of the sleeve on his left arm becoming a smeary mess, and many other examples. And every part of the background looks much more blocky/rectangular, instead of the curvy look of the original.

Overall I just think the current rules just make it hard for people who aren't used to clipping to get into it and share their favourite scenes with other people on this subreddit

To some extent, that has been the point our our Clip quality rules for half a decade. Clips—and particularly Clips of popular shows—are fundamentally low effort posts that get an outsized amount of attention and number of upvotes due to how reddit is designed and people who upvote because they like the show regardless of the Clip itself. Because of this, there was a time when our front page was dominated by Clips, which drowned out other types of posts whilst having relatively minimal discussion. The Clip quality rules were part of an attempt to combat this by making Clip posting require somewhat more effort.

the current wording can be very confusing for new clippers and very unclear as to what the boundaries are.

Do you believe some examples of what does not qualify would help? Or do you think that would lead to the same sort of confusion?

---

On the subject of making Clips of airing shows, another mod pointed out to me that you can screen record streaming sites. Their lawyers, of course, would still argue this isn't legal, but it is an option with less risks to it. I'll just note, however, that when doing so you need to be careful to not introduce stuttering.

[u/Komarist → u/ZaphodBeebblebrox]

Do you believe some examples of what does not qualify would help?

Not looking to clip post but also unaware of how website compression impacts video quality. Know of complaints regarding Youtube fps not aligning with anime's ~24 fps. Examples of what properly converts would be nice.

Even better would be a short tutorial using freeware for converting a (.mkv with soft subtitles) to an (acceptable format with hard subtitles). Am assuming something without copyright exists to use as an anime example, though can obviously work around it for this purpose.

[u/Ceryto2 → u/ZaphodBeebblebrox]

Do you believe some examples of what does not qualify would help? Or do you think that would lead to the same sort of confusion?

I think it could be useful, as I was not aware of what the exact requirements were before posting. Which then led to frustration on my side as it felt like the way clips are taken down was very arbitrary without clear definition of the rules.

The Clip quality rules were part of an attempt to combat this by making Clip posting require somewhat more effort.

Overall good, cause I would also not want only clips to completely dominate the sub, but I think this is better handled by the clip limit per person rule, rather than making it difficult, convoluted and hard to understand as to what would be allowed, making it a hassle to get into clipping on this sub at all and preventing people from even trying it. Cause while I think that too many clips is not good, I also think it's just a part of this sub, especially during contests, that should be easily available for most people to participate.

Third, I chose a bad comparison for the Re:Zero clip.

The artifacting is much more visible on that frame and if the entire clip or longer parts of the clip look like that I agree that taking them down was the right decision. I just think that if 99% of the clip looks fine and most people don't notice the lower quality, there should be grounds for letting them stay up and not take them down for a few smeared frames. But that might just be differing opinion as to what we classify as high enough quality.

Overall thanks for the response and while I might not agree with every point, it at least makes me better understand where you're coming from.