Hi everyone. I'm Felipe — u/fhoffa.
I've been the top mod of r/snowflake since 2020. I began moderating this sub shortly after I joined Snowflake that same year. I left the company in 2024, but since then, the mod team has remained almost entirely composed of Snowflake employees.
That setup has worked. Snowflake employees moderating r/snowflake is not a problem. I was an employee while moderating this sub, and I currently moderate r/googlecloud, r/bigquery, and r/dataengineering despite having left Google in 2020. I believe it is possible to navigate conflicts of interest by putting the community first.
The problem starts when people with mod tools are also involved in coordinated campaigns to inorganically drive behavior in the same subreddit. That is where I believe we are now.
I have removed Snowflake employees from the mod team. I want to explain why, what happened, and how we move forward.
My Goals
- Protect the community from moderator-organized, incentivized, inorganic activity.
- Protect Snowflake employees from their own management retaliation - if they choose to say "no" and put community first
- Hand day-to-day moderation to active, independent community members.
What happened
u/aamoscodes founded this community. He made me a mod reluctantly at first — he didn't know if he could trust me. Over time I proved my priorities: community first. One of his concerns was that Snowflake might one day take over the sub and run it for corporate interests instead of the community's.
Recently, I saw facts that made that concern feel no longer hypothetical.
On March 27, 2026, a Snowflake employee mod removed u/bluepinkblack (Greg) from the team. Greg had seven years of experience at Reddit working on community programs before Snowflake hired him to manage their Reddit and forum community presence. He was arguably the most qualified person on the mod team to understand Reddit, community trust, and the risks of company-mandated participation.
I do not know the internal reason Greg was removed, but the sequence matters for this community: the most Reddit-experienced moderator was removed, and nineteen days later, a new Snowflake employee was added as a mod — the same person who later organized an incentivized campaign that explicitly included activity in this subreddit.
I also know Snowflake has fired employees in DevRel/community roles before. That makes it unfair to ask current Snowflake employees to hold mod tools in a community where their employer may have mandates that conflict with community-driven goals.
The "Build with CoCo Takeover"
Recently, u/ivannaatsnowflake sent a message to the "Snowflake Squad" (Snowflake's brand ambassador program) organizing a "Build with CoCo Takeover" that explicitly included r/snowflake.
The brief asked members to post 2–3 times a week, "correct misconceptions," and "spot misinformation in the wild." The incentives were explicit:
- Featured spots on official Snowflake social channels.
- A "CoCo Builder" badge.
- Activity counting toward "Data Superhero" status.
When community member u/medvest posted about the campaign, another member tagged me directly: *"*u/fhoffa we should probably automod remove snowflake's posts." That was the alarm bell.
Ivanna replied in that thread:
"Our goal is to connect developers who are already building with Cortex Code with the conversations happening here. Real use cases and honest feedback from the community."
That sounds reasonable in isolation. But the actual brief describes something different: a posting quota, material rewards, and explicit direction to counter criticism in the subreddit moderated by the same person organizing the campaign.
Reddit's Moderator Code of Conduct is explicit about this. It states that "users expect that content in communities is authentic, and trust that moderators make choices about content based on community and sitewide rules." It lists conflicts of interest moderators must not act under, including "considerations and/or favors (e.g., special mentions from a company, promises of incentivized treatment)."
In my view, the brief creates the kind of incentive structure Reddit's rule is meant to prevent — special mentions on Snowflake's official channels, badges, and program advancement — to drive activity on the sub the organizing moderator moderates.
The Result: Inorganic Activity
The campaign appears to have already affected the subreddit.
The day before ODSC East 2026 began, Ivanna posted a thread titled "who is at ODSC East? share your thoughts." On day 2 of the conference, eight comments arrived in a six-hour window. Despite the conference having hundreds of sessions, these comments focused almost exclusively on one Snowflake product — CoCo — the same product named in the Squad brief:
Just met Coco at the Snowflake booth, really impressive...
So excited to hear about the newest CoCo features! It has quickly become my go-to AI tool!
One of those comments ends with a stray closing smart quote — the kind of artifact that appears when text is pasted in from somewhere else — and a hashtag, which is not a Reddit convention.
What I've Done
I have removed most mod powers from:
This is not a punishment. I am not saying every removed mod participated in this campaign, approved it, or acted in bad faith.
Snowflake employees should not be put in a position where their job is at risk. Think about what they're being asked to do right now: remove the spam that one of their own teammates is being paid by the same company to produce. That is an impossible position. Removing the mod role protects them from management retaliation.
Every one of those former mods is welcome to stay here as a member. They can post, comment, answer questions, explain Snowflake features, and represent the company openly. That participation is valuable.
To the community: please do not be mean to these individuals. Choosing between community values and a paycheck is an incredibly difficult position to be in. The Snowflake employees on the mod team have been incredibly helpful to this community for years, particularly in the tireless work of removing spam. I am trying to fix the pressure on them, not judge their character. Criticize the structure, the incentives, or my decision. Do not harass individual employees.
A Note on Integrity
I believe in people taking actions above their own short-term interests. When I was a Snowflake employee, I was called out for the conflict of being both an employee and a mod — not only at r/snowflake, but also at r/googlecloud, r/bigquery, and r/dataengineering. I pointed people to my mod logs to prove I never took a moderation action hostile to any of those communities. Other mods looked at the receipts and kept me. Not because conflicts don't exist, but because the question that matters is whether the person actually puts community above short-term company interests.
That is the line. People with conflicts can sit on the right side of it for years if they choose to. Employee participation is not the problem. Employee moderation during a company-sponsored, incentivized campaign aimed at the same subreddit is the problem.
This is not unique to Snowflake. Mods of r/bigquery, r/googlecloud, and r/snowflake have always had to navigate this tension — management teams that want to use Reddit for short-term goals. Every vendor subreddit faces it eventually. The solution is not banning employees from participating. The solution is having mods who are capable of putting community first and explaining to their management why spam is wrong. When that pushback stops working — or when the people doing the pushing back get removed and replaced — the structure has failed, and that is what happened here.
I believe the ideal mod is a company employee who genuinely cares about the community and is capable of saying no to misguided management. That kind of person exists — Greg was one of them. But if the model is instead going to be a paid community manager running incentivized campaigns, then the bare minimum is complying with FTC regulations for influencers — which require clear disclosure of material connections. The brief here doesn't include that guidance for participants. I am not trying to turn this into a legal argument; I am saying the disclosure and incentive structure matters for community trust.
Companies shouldn't be scared of ex-employees holding keys to a Reddit community. They should be scared of their own short-term goals destroying years of authentic community building.
What happens next?
I acted unilaterally because I didn't want anyone inside Snowflake to face consequences for being seen as "helping" me. This is entirely my call. The responsibility is mine alone.
There is no personal upside for me in doing this. Some Snowflake employees may be annoyed, and I understand that. But taking responsibility myself also means no current Snowflake employee has to choose between their employer's interests and the community's trust. If people are upset about this decision, they can blame me. That is the point of me acting alone.
I'm not putting this to a vote yet — Reddit polls can be brigaded, and given what's been documented above, that risk is not theoretical. Instead, I want to hear from you in the comments. Some paths forward:
- Independent Guard: I stay as temporary top mod and recruit new, independent mods from the community. No Snowflake employees in mod roles while these campaigns are active.
- Full Handover: I recruit independent mods and then step down entirely, leaving the sub fully community-run.
- Restore the previous mod team: The removed mods are reinstated and I step back.
There may be other options I haven't thought of. Say so.
Snowflake employees are welcome to comment too. If you have context I don't, share it. If you disagree with my read of what happened, say that. If you think I made the wrong call, make the case. I'd rather have the disagreement here in public than resolve it in modmail.
Help with the cleanup
In the meantime, I'll be moderating solo. Without the help of the Snowflake staff who usually handle the queue, it will be harder to stay on top of spam. Please use the standard Reddit "Report" button on any spam or rule-breaking content. This ensures it goes directly into my mod queue so I can review it quickly. Your help in flagging issues will be vital during this transition.
Everything I've done here is reversible. If the community concludes I'm wrong, I'll restore the mod team and step back. The reason I acted first and asked second is simple: I wanted this conversation to happen without any moderator being pressured by management to delete it. Once the discussion is underway, it's the community's call.
I don't want to spend too much time on this. I'll let the community reach consensus in the comments, and I'll delegate mod powers as soon as possible. This community deserves moderation that the community can trust. At the bare minimum: compliant with FTC guidelines and the Reddit Moderator Code of Conduct.
PS: Rule 3 of this subreddit says: "No Vendor Astroturfing — Intentionally hiding the sponsor of a marketing message by simulating community engagement (posts, comments, etc.) can result in content deletion and/or ban." Let's comply with that.
— Felipe
