Reddit Clone Features: Communities, Moderation and Coins

A discussion platform is really three products sharing one database: what members do, what moderators enforce and what the operator controls. This page walks through a single post and the community around it, picks out the capabilities that carry commercial weight, compares the package with the alternatives and says plainly what we set up around the platform and what stays with you.

Get it for $3,699 See the Reddit Clone
6
post types
4
role tiers per community
6 days
to launch
On this page10 sections
  1. All 55 Reddit Clone features, by role
  2. One post, from a first draft to a settled dispute
  3. The Reddit Clone, on screen
  4. The capabilities that carry the business
  5. Reddit, Reddit Clone and building a forum yourself
  6. What the platform is built on
  7. What we set up around the platform
  8. Try the live Reddit Clone demo
  9. Reddit Clone feature FAQs
  10. Explore the Reddit Clone

All 55 Reddit Clone features, by role

The complete list, grouped by the person who uses each feature. Nothing is hidden behind a plan tier: this is what ships in the platform.

Members

17 features
Text and link posts
The two plainest modes: write a discussion post or share a link for the community to talk about.
Image and video posts
Media posts carry the same voting, comments and moderation flags as text, with uploads validated on the way in.
Polls with vote capture
A poll post collects votes inside the thread, so a community can settle a question without leaving it.
Crossposts with lineage
Sharing a post into another community records where it came from, so the origin stays traceable.
Drafts and scheduling
Members save a draft and restore it later, or set a post to publish at a chosen time.
Edit history
Posts and comments keep a record of edits, which helps moderators judge whether a change was in good faith.
Recursive comment trees
Replies nest through parent and child links, and thread retrieval is aware of depth.
Votes on posts and comments
Upvotes and downvotes apply to both posts and individual comments, which lets the community rank itself.
Save, hide and pin
Members keep posts to return to, hide ones they do not want and pin the ones they need on top.
Follow and block graphs
People follow accounts they like and block ones they do not, and both lists shape what appears.
Keyword and topic filters
Personal filters hide topics and words a member never wants to see in any feed.
Custom feeds
A member composes a feed from a bundle of communities, which suits people who follow a theme and not a single place.
Home, Popular and Following
Three standard feeds cover personal, trending and followed content, with domain-based browsing added for links.
Search with typeahead
Full-text search spans posts, communities and users, and suggests results as the member types.
Direct messages and modmail
Thread-based messages with mute and leave states, plus a dedicated channel to contact a community mod team.
Wiki, live threads and chat
Communities keep a wiki with revisions, run live threads with streamed updates and host their own chat.
Notifications and digests
In-app alerts, Web Push, Expo tokens and an email digest, with muting available per community.

Moderators

13 features
Community creation
Anyone with permission can start a community and choose public, restricted or private visibility.
Rules and flairs
Each community publishes its rules and defines flairs that categorize posts and members.
Membership roles and states
Members, moderators, admins and owners hold different permissions, scoped to that single community.
Report intake
Members file reports against posts and comments using a reason taxonomy the community defines.
Moderator queue
Reports collect in one queue where a moderator decides the outcome and the decision is attributed.
Removal reason library
Saved reasons keep enforcement consistent and tell members exactly why something was removed.
Post and comment actions
Dedicated actions remove, approve or otherwise act on content, with the result recorded.
Bans with expiry
A ban can end on a date, so a cooling-off period does not become a permanent exile by accident.
Ban appeals
Banned members submit an appeal and moderators resolve it through explicit states with timestamps.
Automod rules
Per-community rules apply automatically, which takes routine enforcement off volunteer moderators.
Mod notes and mod log
Private notes on members and a full log of actions give a rotating team shared memory.
Soft deletion
Removed content leaves view but keeps its moderation context, so an audit can still reconstruct events.
Wiki revision history
Every wiki change is stored with its revision, so vandalism can be reversed.

Economy

11 features
Premium entitlements
A premium record holds status, expiry and the provider reference for a subscription.
Gift premium checkout
A member can buy premium for someone else, which turns generosity into a revenue event.
Coin wallet
Each member has a coin balance that funds awards and other in-community spending.
Append-only ledger
Every wallet movement is written as a transaction instead of overwriting a counter, so balances are auditable.
Top-up checkout and capture
Buying coins runs through checkout and capture routes with webhook handling for the payment provider.
Award catalogue
Operators define the awards members can give, each with its own coin cost.
Awards on posts, comments and users
Recognition can be attached to content or people, which turns appreciation into recurring spend.
Premium stipend loop
Premium members receive coins automatically, which feeds award spending and further conversion.
Webhook signature checks
Payment webhooks verify provider signatures and handle repeats safely.
Site configuration plane
A key-value store lets operators change pricing, gating and feature availability without redeploying.
Revenue in one ledger
Premium, wallet and awards reconcile against the same ledger rather than three separate systems.

Operators

14 features
Site statistics
Platform-level counts of members, content and activity for the people who run the network.
Historical trend endpoints
Trend data supports period-over-period reporting without exporting to a spreadsheet first.
Analytics summary
Aggregated engagement signals across communities, content and members guide growth decisions.
Revenue summary
Premium and wallet revenue appear in one view tied to the product ledger.
User administration
Operators search accounts, inspect them and act on suspension state and site role.
Integration status
Diagnostics show which providers for OAuth, billing, email and push are configured in this environment.
Moderation oversight
Reports, actions and appeals across every community are visible from one platform view.
Community governance
Operators manage membership and roles, invite moderators and keep per-community policy records.
Automation health
Status for the jobs that send digests, archive content, publish scheduled posts and pay stipends.
Health endpoint
A liveness route supports uptime monitoring and checks a deployment after release.
Rate-limit presets
Four presets cover default, auth, write and strict traffic, applied per route family.
Upload hardening
Uploads face MIME allowlists, magic-byte checks, executable rejection, size limits and UUID filenames.
Two-factor and sessions
TOTP two-factor with hashed backup codes, and database-backed sessions in httpOnly cookies.
Test scaffolding
Playwright and Vitest setups ship with the code so your team can add checks from day one.

One post, from a first draft to a settled dispute

Follow a single post through every layer of the platform. The sequence shows how posting, ranking, enforcement and spending connect, and why a community product has to treat all of them as one system and not as separate plug-ins.

  1. A member signs up and picks interests

    A new member registers with email or phone, verifies the account and may add two-factor authentication. Choosing interests during onboarding shapes the first feed, so the member sees communities worth joining and not an empty page, which is the biggest single factor in whether a new account returns.

  2. A community is joined or created

    Communities can be public, restricted or private, each with its own rules, flairs and membership states. A member who creates one becomes its first moderator, and the four-tier role model decides who may do what from that point onward, entirely within that community. A private community suits a paid cohort or a team, a restricted one lets everyone read but only approved members post, and a public one is open to anyone, so one platform can host all three without special code.

  3. The post is written and published

    The member picks a text, link, image, video, poll or crosspost, saves a draft if unfinished, or schedules it for later. Edit history is kept, so the moderators can see what a post said when it was reported, even if the author has since changed it.

  4. Votes and comments rank it

    Members upvote and downvote, and replies form nested threads where each comment is voted on separately. Ranking by votes is how a community surfaces its own best material without an editor, and soft deletion leaves the thread readable so context survives. A thread that ranks by votes also shows new members what the community values, and because replies nest, a long argument stays readable instead of collapsing into one flat list.

  5. A report enters the queue

    If the post breaks a rule, another member reports it with a reason. The report appears in the community's moderation queue, where a moderator can remove the post using a saved reason, add a private note, warn the author or ban them for a set period.

  6. The member can appeal

    A banned member submits an appeal, and moderators resolve it through explicit states, so the outcome is recorded rather than lost in a private message. The log keeps who decided what and when, which protects volunteers when a decision is questioned. A member who is wrongly removed gets a route back, and a moderator who made the call can point to the stated rule, which keeps volunteers willing to keep working.

  7. Recognition becomes revenue for you

    Meanwhile another member buys coins and gives an award to the post. The purchase and the award both land in the ledger that the operator sees in the revenue summary, so one action feeds appreciation, income and reporting together. The author is thanked in public, the operator sees the coin spend in the summary, and the same entry can later be traced if the member asks about their balance.

The Reddit Clone, on screen

Real screens from the working product. Your platform ships rebranded with your name, logo and colors.

  • Dark web discover page with popular communities table and browse by topic tag chips
    Web app
  • Phone list of joined communities with round initials, short descriptions and a tab bar
    User app
  • Phone discover screen listing popular communities with member counts in dark rounded rows
    User app
  • Phone modmail thread with an orange sent message, a grey reply and a message box
    User app
  • Phone profile page with Posts, Comments, Saved tabs and pinned posts from several communities
    User app

The capabilities that carry the business

A forum script can store posts. These are the parts that take longest to build properly and that decide whether volunteers keep working, members keep returning and the operator can see what the platform earns.

  • Six post types, one engine

    Text, link, image, video, poll and crosspost share one publishing path with drafts, scheduling and edit history. Having a single engine means a new format reaches every feed, search and moderation tool at once, instead of needing its own special handling each time. Drafts and scheduling matter to moderators and brands who plan announcements, and edit history lets a community see what changed in a post after replies arrived.

  • Four-tier community roles

    Each community has its own ladder of authority, and a moderator in one has no special rights in another. That boundary is what lets you hand day-to-day policing to volunteers safely while keeping platform-wide control with the operator. A volunteer who is trusted in a hobby group should not be able to remove posts in a medical or legal group, so the role model protects both the members and the operator.

  • Per-community automation

    Each community defines its own automatic rules, so a cooking group and a coding group are not forced into one global policy. Rules that fit the topic reduce the amount of manual work volunteers face and keep enforcement from feeling arbitrary to members. A cooking group might require a recipe flair on every post, while a coding group might hold links from new accounts for review, and each reduces repetitive moderation in its own way.

  • Wiki and live threads

    Community wiki pages with revision history store the knowledge a group builds up, and live threads stream updates during events. Both give a community assets that outlast any single post, and both increase how much a member would lose by leaving. A wiki holds the rules, the starter guide and the answers to questions that otherwise appear every week, while a live thread keeps an event such as a match or a launch in one place.

  • Custom feeds

    Home, popular and following feeds are joined by feeds built from bundles of communities, with mutes per community. Members shape their own view, so a platform with many topics stays useful to someone who cares about only a few of them. A member who follows many communities can group a few into a bundle, such as all the cooking ones, and mute a topic that is noisy this week without leaving the community.

  • Coin ledger and awards

    Premium, coin top-ups, award purchases and stipends are written to one append-only ledger. A single source of truth means no reconciliation between separate systems, and an operator can answer a member's billing question by reading one record. Append-only also means entries are never edited after the fact, so an error is corrected by a new entry, and the history shows both the mistake and the fix.

  • Site configuration plane

    Prices, feature gates and availability live in a key-value configuration the operator edits at runtime. You can test an offer or switch off a feature without a release, which matters when you are still learning what your members will pay for. A launch discount on premium, a pause on coin top-ups during an incident or a switch to hide a feature from a market are all values changed in the operator console, not releases.

Reddit, Reddit Clone and building a forum yourself

The original site cannot be bought, hosted or rebranded, so the practical comparison is between the second and third columns. The first column describes the category as it is generally understood, to show what changes when you run the platform and hold the code.

Reddit, Reddit Clone and building a forum yourself
AspectRedditReddit CloneBuilding from scratch
Who runs it The company that operates the site, under its own rulesYou, on your own host under your own nameYou, once every part has been designed and built
Community model Topic communities with volunteer moderators and per-community rulesPublic, restricted and private communities with four role tiersA single forum until the community model is built
Moderation depth Moderator tools managed by the owner of the siteQueues, removal reasons, bans, appeals, notes and automationOften a report button and a delete action
Money features Premium subscription and purchasable awards, set by the ownerPremium, coin wallet, awards and stipends on one ledgerWhatever you design, with money logic written from zero
Time to launch Not for sale, so not applicable to a buyerSix working days for the ready-made platformA long program for a team with community experience
Source code Closed and inaccessible to anyone outside the owning companyComplete code on a mainstream web stack, yoursYours after paying for every line of it to be written
Mobile app Official apps built and published by the owner itselfA branded Android app included, iOS set up for youSeparate builds that need their own budget
Brand identity Fixed to the owner's identity, name and visual styleComplete white-labeling under your name, logo and colorsWhatever you choose, applied by hand to each surface

What the platform is built on

The stack is mainstream JavaScript on a standard relational database. That matters because most development teams already know it, and a technical reviewer can read the same documents we do. Each layer below is named only as far as the package documentation names it.

What the platform is built on
Web appNext.js 16 with the App Router and React 19, delivering the responsive member interface across devices.
APIA set of route handlers built into the same Next.js project and grouped by domain, covering posts, communities, moderation and billing.
DatabasePostgreSQL accessed through Prisma 7, with a schema, migrations and seed scripts included in the source.
IdentitySession cookies backed by the database, bcrypt password hashing, OAuth sign-in and optional TOTP two-factor with backup codes.
Payments and jobsStripe and Razorpay route families for billing, plus secret-gated cron routes for digests, scheduled posts, archival and stipends.
Mobile and pushA branded Android app on the same API, with Web Push for browsers and Expo tokens for devices.
TestingA Playwright and Vitest setup and a health endpoint are included, giving your team a starting point for automated checks.

What we set up around the platform

A ready-made product has edges, and a community platform has duties around it that software cannot take over. We list them here so you can plan for them before launch and not discover them with real members watching.

  • Native iOS app

    The package includes a branded Android app. We can also set up a native iOS client that reuses the same API and push setup, and we confirm the scope with you if you want it for launch.

  • Creator payouts from awards

    Awards are bought with coins and recorded on the ledger, and we can set up paying creators out from award income once you decide the rules and the tax position.

  • Distributed rate limiting

    Rate limits ship as four presets applied by route family. Enforcing them across several servers needs Upstash Redis, which is configured at deployment, and it is only required when you run more than one instance.

  • Provider credentials

    Payments, sign-in, email and push all need keys from accounts in your own name. We wire them during deployment, but the accounts, their fees and their approval processes belong to you.

  • Moderators and policies

    The tools are provided. Recruiting volunteer moderators, writing community guidelines and deciding how appeals are judged are human tasks that decide whether a community feels fair, and they cannot be shipped in code.

  • Legal duties

    Retention periods, data protection and rules on user content differ by market. A data export endpoint is included, but deciding what your jurisdiction requires is a legal question we cannot answer for you.

Try the live Reddit Clone demo

The demo is a running copy of the platform with demo branding and public sample accounts, one for each seat in the system. Sign in as a member to post and vote, as a moderator to work the report queue, and as the operator to see site statistics and revenue. An Android build runs against the same data.

  • Member

    Open the Member demo
    Login
    dave
    Password
    password123

    Worth trying

    • Join a community and open its rules
    • Publish a post and vote on others
    • Reply deep inside a comment thread
    • Open the coin wallet and the award shelf

  • Moderator

    Open the Moderator demo
    Login
    bob
    Password
    password123

    Worth trying

    • Work an item in the report queue
    • Remove a post using a saved reason
    • Add a moderator note to a member
    • Review an open appeal

  • Operator console

    Open the Operator console demo
    Login
    alice
    Password
    password123

    Worth trying

    • Read site statistics and the trend views
    • Open the revenue summary
    • Check the integration status page
    • Look at automation health for scheduled jobs

  • Android app

    Open the Android app demo
    Login
    carol
    Password
    password123

    Worth trying

    • Install the app and sign in
    • Scroll the home feed and vote
    • Check how notifications arrive

Reddit Clone feature FAQs

Can communities be private?

Yes. Each community is public, restricted or private. Restricted communities let anyone read but control who can post, and private ones hide content from outsiders. Roles and membership states decide who gets in, so invitation-only circles for partners or staff are possible.

What happens when someone deletes a comment?

Comments are soft deleted, which removes the content from view but keeps the position in the thread and the record for moderators. This preserves the shape of the discussion, so replies still make sense, and it lets moderators review what was said.

Can members block or mute others?

Members can follow and block other accounts, mute communities and hide chosen keywords or topics from their feeds. These controls let people tune their experience themselves, which reduces the load on moderators and improves how the platform feels to newer members.

How does modmail work?

Members can contact a community's moderators through a dedicated channel, separate from ordinary direct messages. Conversations are tracked as threads with read status, so a team of moderators can handle questions and ban queries in one place.

Is there email or push for new replies?

Members receive in-app alerts, Web Push in the browser and device notifications through Expo tokens. A scheduled job can also send an email digest. Members can mute individual communities, so notifications stay useful instead of overwhelming.

Can I export a member's data?

A data export endpoint is included, which helps with member requests about their own information. How you handle retention and deletion in your market is a policy decision for you, and the platform provides the technical hooks to follow it.

Does search cover everything?

Full-text search covers posts, communities and users, with typeahead suggestions as members type and trending surfaces for discovery. Because members decide what to find through search as much as through feeds, it is treated as a core feature rather than an extra.

Explore the Reddit Clone

The overview and its companion pages answer the main questions in turn. Pick the one you need next.

Go deeper on this platform

→Start here

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Trademark and independence notice

This page uses the name Reddit to describe a type of platform. The product sold here is separate software, built independently, and Reddit has no part in it.

Why this name

"Reddit clone" is industry shorthand that founders use when searching for software with a comparable business model. It names a category of product, not a copy of Reddit.

Who built this

The platform is an original product designed and written by Miracuves. It contains no code, design, graphics or content originating from the Reddit website or applications, and it ships under your own brand.

Trademarks

Reddit and its logos are trademarks of their respective owner and are named here for reference only. GetFame is not affiliated with, sponsored by or endorsed by Reddit. Rights holders can write to legal@miracuves.com.

Operator responsibility. The operator of a launched platform is responsible for legal compliance in the markets it serves. Nothing on this page is legal advice.Read the full disclaimer