First of all, a huge thank you to everyone who participated! All 950 of you!! Here are the results, broken down by section. Data nerds, buckle up!

Sorry this is so much text! We asked a lot of questions, so there's a lot to summarize! See the stickied comment for a TL;DR.

You can see the raw responses here.

Background

We wanted to know how people are using & accessing the subreddit.

Takeaways:

• How do you participate?
  • Most people are here to lurk & get info! Plot of all responses. Summary plot.
• How do you access r/curlyhair?
  • Most people use mobile only (~60%) or both mobile & desktop (~30%). Plot of all responses. Summary plot.
    • This is super helpful for us to know, especially for the wiki!
• When you come to r/curlyhair, what are you looking for?
  • Most want to look up info, poke around the subreddit, and find hair inspo. Plot
• When did you subscribe/join?
  • ~60% within the last 6 months! Plot
• Have you ever interacted with r/curlyhair mods?
  • Only a small handful of you have interacted with us. Thank you for the very kind feedback! You can see all the responses here.
  • Whoever wrote this: "They are helpful and caring. But also take no shit." I love you and thanks for the new life goal/motto. :P

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Receiving vs. giving help -- we all want help, but fewer people are here to give help!

• People who say they're here to help
• People who say they're here to actively get help (i.e. by asking questions)
• People who say they're here to passively get help (i.e. by looking things up)

This helps explain the feeling of questions going unanswered lately. It makes sense that as the subreddit grows, there are more people asking questions and fewer people answering them.

Please stick around to answer questions & share your experience! You don’t need to be an expert to help someone!

We didn't set out to answer this question, but it's so helpful to actually see the numbers on this.

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Current rules & policies

Takeaways:

• Our current rules are good. They'll stay the same. Plot
  • Some people think we require routines for non-photo posts like discussions, memes, & curly pets. We don't! It's only necessary if there's a photo (and it's not an obvious joke post).
  • There's some concern that the off-topic rule is too strict. We rarely, rarely remove comments under this rule. For us, it is mostly a fallback when people get into really gnarly, heated discussions that are better suited for other subs, or when folks ask about keratin straightening, etc.
  • There are very mixed feelings about youtube. More on that below. For now, remember that youtube is ALWAYS allowed if it's not your own channel. (99.9% of the youtube posts here are from new accounts who don't participate though.)

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New rules & policies

Summary plot. The responses were VERY mixed. (w/o neutral bars -- easier to see trends)

Going through these one by one:

• Selfies must be head/hair only (like r/makeupaddiction). Wouldn't apply to "before" pics
  • Mixed response. Since this would be a HUGE moderation workload increase, we won't be doing this one.
• Only allow memes on weekends
  • No
  • There's some confusion here... we wouldn't allow ONLY pets & memes on weekends. Other way around. The only time they'd be allowed at all would be on weekends. We're not implementing this anyways, but just wanted to clarify!
• Only allow curly pets on weekends
  • No
  • These aren't that common anyways, so banning them or moving them to a weekend isn't worth it. It's a love or hate kind of thing.
• No brand names in post titles
  • We definitely won't do this.
• Have a "text posts only" rule 1 day/week
  • Maybe. We will experiment with this if we can find a way to do it automatically.(Side note: if you know how to do this automatically, let us know!!)
  • For those who asked why we'd even do this... it would bring more visibility to help posts rather than selfies for one day per week. And yes, photos could be posted as a link inside!
• Have a "text posts only" rule 2 days/week
  • No
• Don't allow reposts
  • Yes. We'll be pretty loose about it and only remove them if they're reported, and use some discretion about when it was last reposted.

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Q: Did we miss anything?

Here are some suggestions from that

• Ban "curl type" posts
• Ban beginner posts with no info.
• Require hair texture & porosity in the routine.
  • We can definitely suggest this, but it's too advanced to absolutely require it.
• Ban "non-CG shaming"
  • We can add this to the curly gatekeeping rule. I honestly haven't seen this happening, but please do report it if it happens! We're not here to be the hair police -- if you're using silicones/sulfate and it ain't broke, don't fix it!

To address the first two points...

Right now we have Automod message everyone who makes a post, letting them know about the routine rule, where the wiki is, etc. Should we make this a comment instead? Then everyone knows that OP was asked to include it & it's harder to ignore. Only downside is spam on every post.

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If you wrote out other comments in the poll, please know we did read them and considered them, especially when it comes to strong feelings about new rules! They were super helpful but too much to summarize here. If you want to read other comments, click here see all raw responses.

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Social media: new rules

Summary plot. (w/o neutral bars in middle -- easier to see trends)

• Require an account age minimum (to self-promote)
  • No
• Require a subreddit karma minimum (to self-promote)
  • No
• Require a 1:10 content ratio
  • Yes -- we can require this for sharing your instagram handle
• Keep the existing self-promo rule
  • Yes
• Allow youtube posts, max 1x/week if it's your own channel
  • No
• Allow youtube posts with prior mod approval
  • No
• Allow instagram handles, but only in user flair
  • No (mixed response, mostly neutral/positive)
• Allow instagram handles, but not links
  • Mixed response. We will allow this on a trial basis. If you include it as a comment or if someone asks, it's fine. If you spam it, we'll warn you that it's not ok and remove those comments.

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Q: How should we use removal reasons? Plot

We'll keep things the same, but aim to use more removal reasons in non-r/all posts.

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Wiki & resources

Summary:

• How often do you use the resources in r/curlyhair?
  • Either very often or not at all. Plot
• When was the last time you used these resources?
  • ~50% used them in the last week. Plot
• What were you looking for?
  • Mostly products, beginner info, & techniques. Plot
  • Note that this was asked as a freeform question (not smart) so this was me doing my best to categorize the answers. We did look at them in more detail.
• Did you find what you were looking for?
  • ~85% yes. Plot
• We didn't directly ask this, but we were curious what people had the hardest time finding.
  • Plot: who didn't find what they were looking for? Mostly ingredients, FAQ/troubleshooting (although this is tricky to cover without going overboard, & it's super personal/varied), and wavy info (hair-type specific tips mostly covers wavies wanting more info).
  • We'll use this info to update the wiki! (Gradually)

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Demographics

Summary:

• What's your gender?
  • Overwhelmingly female. Plot
  • Note that I'm sensitive to gender identities but also didn't want to single out anyone by their hand-typed response so I've categorized the responses. We did look at this by hand as well.
• What is your age?
  • Pretty broad range! Curls know no age limit :) Plot
• Do you have wavy/curly hair?
  • Overwhelmingly yes. Plot
• Where are you located?
  • Mostly USA (~75%). Plot
  • Plot excluding USA.

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Whew! Long post. Kudos if you made it this far. As always, feel free to add more feedback below! Thanks again for all your help!