Readerling Trust & Safety

Readerling is built and operated by an author, for authors and readers. This page explains how we think about safety on the platform, what behavior we don't allow, and what happens when someone breaks the rules.

We wrote this because most platforms in our space don't. We think readers and authors deserve to know what to expect from the platform they're trusting with their attention, their work, and their community.

This page will evolve as the platform grows. When we make significant changes, we'll say so publicly rather than quietly updating the page.

What Readerling Is

At launch, Readerling is an information platform that connects authors to readers who want to follow their work.

Authors can publish pen names, story worlds, book series, and individual book pages. They can post updates about any of those things — progress notes, snippets, pre-order announcements, behind-the-scenes thoughts. They can include store links so readers can purchase their books through whatever retailers the author uses.

Readers can follow authors, story worlds, series, or individual books. They receive updates in a chronological feed. At launch, readers can react to posts with emojis but cannot comment, message, or form groups. We will add more interaction features over time, carefully.

We are not a bookstore yet. We do not host books for sale on the platform itself at launch. We are not a social network. We are not an algorithmic feed designed to maximize engagement at all costs. We are a quiet place where readers can stay connected to the work of authors they care about, without that signal being drowned out by everything else on the internet.

Our Principles

A few things that guide how we run the platform.

We are not algorithmically optimizing for engagement. Feeds are chronological. We do not amplify outrage. We do not reward provocative content with extra reach. Posts from authors you follow appear when those authors post them, in the order they were posted, full stop.

We trust good-faith users and verify our trust over time. As you use the platform authentically — reading, following authors you genuinely like, providing thoughtful feedback when we ask for it — your contributions carry more weight in community signals. As users show patterns of bad-faith behavior, their contributions carry less weight. This is built into the platform's architecture. It is not something we do as a punishment; it is how we learn whose judgment to trust.

We are transparent about how we make decisions. When we take action on an account, we tell that account why. When we have public-facing community signals (like reader-reported trope tags), we show the underlying numbers. We do not run a black box.

Authors and readers are equally important. Authors create the work that makes the platform worth using. Readers are the audience that makes the work worth creating. Neither side gets to abuse the other. Our rules apply across the board.

We will sometimes be wrong, and we will fix it. No moderation system is perfect. When we make mistakes, we want to hear about them, and we will reverse decisions we got wrong.

What We Don't Allow

The following behaviors will get an account frozen pending investigation, and banned permanently if confirmed.

Review bombing and coordinated harassment. Organizing or participating in coordinated efforts to flood an author or book with bad-faith negative reviews, ratings, reactions, or reports. This includes calling on your readers, fans, or social media followers to target another user. It does not include readers independently choosing to review a book they read.

Counter-review bombing. Same thing in the other direction. Authors who organize their fans to artificially boost their own work or to retaliate against legitimate negative reviews are subject to the same enforcement.

Fake accounts and bought engagement. Creating accounts (or paying others to create accounts) for the purpose of boosting follower counts, manipulating engagement metrics, or inflating perceived popularity. This applies whether the accounts are yours, purchased from a service, or rallied from a coordinated community. Engagement on Readerling is meant to reflect real human interest.

Selling or buying followers, reviews, or platform metrics. Operating a service that offers Readerling followers, reviews, or other platform engagement for payment. Using such a service as a customer. Either side of this transaction is a ban-level offense.

Impersonation. Creating a pen name or profile that represents yourself as someone you are not — another real author, a real public figure, or someone designed to be confused with another user on the platform.

Sock puppet accounts. Operating multiple accounts to make your activity appear larger than it is, to evade enforcement actions, or to harass other users from a "clean" account.

Hate speech and targeted harassment. Attacks on people based on race, ethnicity, religion, gender, sexual orientation, disability, or similar protected characteristics. Slurs used as attacks. Calls for real-world violence against people or groups. Doxxing or sharing private information about other users.

Spam and unrelated promotion. Pitches for MLM schemes, cryptocurrency, get-rich-quick programs, paid coaching, affiliate marketing, or other products and services unrelated to your own writing. Mass-marketing copy. Coordinated promotion campaigns by accounts that exist solely to promote.

Manipulation of community signals. When we introduce community-driven features like reader feedback on book tropes or genres, coordinated efforts to manipulate those signals — to falsely brand a book with tropes it doesn't have, to falsely claim a book belongs to a genre it doesn't, to falsely strip a book of accurate tags — will be treated the same as review bombing.

Illegal content. Sexual content involving anyone depicted as a minor, including in fictional writing. Real threats of violence against identified people. Content facilitating other clearly illegal acts.

This list will grow as the platform does. We will update this page when it changes, with notice.

What "Credible Evidence" Means

We do not act on rumors, anecdotes, or reports from people who happen to dislike an author or reader. We act on evidence.

Credible evidence means something we can verify. Examples:

• A public social media post (Facebook, TikTok, Twitter/X, Bluesky, Discord, Reddit, etc.) in which a user calls on others to target another user, post fake reviews, brigade an account, or take coordinated action against the platform's rules. Screenshots are useful starting points but we will look for the original post when possible.
• An email, DM, or message in which a user solicits paid follower or review services, or admits to participating in coordinated abuse.
• Patterns of activity on Readerling itself that match coordinated abuse — sudden review spikes from accounts with linked behavior, follow bursts from accounts with shared signatures, sign-up clusters tied to specific external links, identical or near-identical review text across accounts.
• Records from payment processors, advertising platforms, or third-party services that show transactions for prohibited services.

What does not count as credible evidence:

• Multiple people saying they heard from someone else that an author is doing something bad. Hearsay, even repeated hearsay, is not evidence.
• A user disliking another user, even strongly. Personal feuds are not evidence of platform abuse.
• A negative review, by itself. Negative reviews are part of having a public platform.
• An accusation made anonymously without any supporting material.

We investigate based on credible evidence. We act based on what the investigation finds.

Account States and Enforcement

Accounts on Readerling exist in one of four states.

Active. The default state. The account is in good standing and can use all platform features available to it.

Restricted. We have observed behavior that may violate our policies, but we are not certain. The account remains active but specific features may be temporarily limited (for example, new followers from a recent suspicious cluster may not count toward visible totals, or new reviews may be held in moderation). The user is notified and can appeal or provide context. Restrictions are temporary and lift if our investigation finds no issue.

Frozen. We have credible reason to believe a serious violation has occurred. The account cannot post, follow, or take other actions. Existing content remains visible (or may be hidden if necessary) pending investigation. The user is notified of the freeze, the reason, and the appeal process. Most freezes resolve within a few days. The freeze either lifts (returning the account to active) or escalates to a ban.

Banned. Confirmed serious violation. The account is permanently closed. Posted content is removed or hidden according to the type of violation. Banned accounts cannot be appealed and cannot return under a different identity. We retain records of bans to prevent re-registration.

Most bans are reserved for the offenses listed above as "what we don't allow." Smaller violations — accidental spam-like behavior from a confused new user, a single overheated political post, a poorly-worded review that crosses a line — get warnings, post removals, or temporary restrictions, not bans. We try to be proportionate.

Appeals

You can appeal any restriction or freeze by replying to the notification you received. Appeals go to a human reviewer (currently, the platform's founder; eventually, a trust and safety team). We aim to respond within 48 hours.

Bans are not appealable. If you have been banned, we have already investigated and concluded that the evidence supports the action. We are not going to relitigate.

That said: if you believe a ban was made in error — for example, you believe the evidence we acted on was forged, or you were the victim of impersonation, or you believe you were misidentified — you can write to us once, and one time, with new information that you believe changes the picture. We will look. We will not engage in repeated correspondence about closed cases.

How Community Signals Will Work

This section describes features we are building, not features that exist at launch. We are telling you about them now so you understand where the platform is going.

Over time, Readerling will include community-driven signals — reader feedback on whether a book contains particular tropes, whether a book belongs to a particular genre, whether tags accurately represent the work. These signals will be visible publicly: "87% of readers who finished this book agree it contains the enemies-to-lovers trope," or "62% of readers who finished this book consider it epic fantasy."

Two things to know about how this will work.

First, the more authentically active you are on Readerling — the longer your account has been around, the more genuinely you engage with the platform — the more your feedback weighs in these signals. A new account that shows up to vote on a single book gets less weight than a long-standing reader with a consistent history of thoughtful contributions. We are not going to publish the exact formula, because that would make it easier to game, but we will be transparent about the principle.

Second, we monitor for coordinated manipulation of these signals. If thirty new accounts suddenly show up to claim a particular book doesn't fit its genre, we will notice, and we will investigate, and if it's a coordinated campaign, the accounts involved will be banned.

The goal of this system is to make the community itself a check on bad behavior — both authors who mis-tag their work to game discovery, and readers who try to weaponize the tag system against authors they dislike. We want trustworthy users to have more influence over time, and untrustworthy users to have less. We want to reward authentic engagement, not optimize for outrage.

What This Page Doesn't Cover

A few things deliberately not in this document.

We do not list every behavior that might result in moderation. The list above covers the major categories. Edge cases and smaller issues will be handled by judgment.

We do not commit to specific response times for routine reports. We aim to be fast. We are not going to promise SLAs we can't meet.

We do not promise that we will always agree with you. Some of our decisions will disappoint people. Some will be wrong, and we will fix those. Some will be right even though they disappoint someone. We will explain our reasoning when we can.

Reporting and Contact

You can report content or behavior using the report function in the app or website. Reports go to the moderation queue and are reviewed by a human.

For appeals, for serious safety concerns, or for things that don't fit the report function, you can reach us at admin@readerling.com.

We read everything. We respond to most things. We will not respond to abuse directed at us; threats, slurs, or harassment of moderation staff result in immediate ban and termination of correspondence.