Be honest in your profile
Use recent photos of you. No catfishing. No decade-old shots. If a stranger meeting you at a coffee shop wouldn't recognize the person in the picture, the picture doesn't belong here.
Community guidelines
How we keep this place worth being in.
Red Thread runs on the community. The whole product breaks when people stop being honest about who they are, or when judges stop voting in good faith. These guidelines are the smallest set of rules that make the rest of it work. Read them; they actually matter.
As a Dater
Write a real bio
The community is voting on your pairs based on what you wrote. Generic, copy-pasted, or empty bios get less traction. Specific is good.
Set accurate preferences
Gender, gender preferences, age range. These directly control who you can be paired with. Misrepresenting them wastes other people's time.
The judge note is for judges
Use the judge bio to say what daters don't see: what kind of person you actually want. Don't waste it on jokes only daters would get.
As a Judge
Vote in good faith
Read both profiles. Think about it. Vote yes if you'd genuinely bet on the pair, no if you wouldn't. The algorithm weighs you more as your accuracy goes up. Random voting hurts the people you're voting on.
Don't troll
No coordinated yes votes for friends. No coordinated no votes against someone you don't like. No vote rings. If we detect coordinated voting, we wipe the votes and ban the accounts involved.
Skip when you're unsure
Refresh the feed if you don't have a strong read on a pair. There's no penalty for not voting on a pair you can't judge fairly.
Report what shouldn't be there
If you see a profile that looks fake, looks underage, or has inappropriate photos that slipped through, tap the safety menu and report it. The community is the front line.
In conversations
Be a person
The community already vouched for the pair. Take a breath and have a real conversation. You don't need to perform.
Consent before content
Don't send sexual content, sexual messages, or photos of intimate body parts without explicit, ongoing consent. Unsolicited explicit images are an immediate ban.
No moving people off-platform under pressure
Switching to texting or Instagram is fine when both people are comfortable. Pressuring someone to leave the platform, especially right after matching, is a red flag the community has flagged before. Don't be that.
If you're done, you can just say so
"Hey, I don't think we're a fit, take care" is always fine. Ghosting is fine too. Harassing someone for not responding is not.
Never, ever
These behaviors lead to immediate, permanent bans, and, where appropriate, referrals to law enforcement:
- Harassment, threats, slurs, intimidation, repeated unwanted contact on or off Red Thread.
- Sexual content without consent, especially unsolicited explicit images.
- Catfishing or impersonation, using someone else's photos, faking identity, AI-generated likenesses passed off as you.
- Minors, Red Thread is 18+. Underage users get removed and underage targeting gets escalated.
- Solicitation and scams, asking for money, gift cards, crypto, investment opportunities, or pushing OnlyFans / escort services.
- Hate speech, attacking people for their race, religion, sexual orientation, gender identity, disability, or any other protected characteristic.
- Violence or self-harm content, threats, gore, encouragement of self-harm. If you're in crisis, please contact a local hotline; we are not equipped to be one.
- Coordinated abuse, vote rings, mass-report bombs, brigading, fake account farms.
- Ban evasion, creating new accounts to get around a previous ban.
What happens when something breaks
We use a graduated response. Severity matters; intent matters; history matters.
- Warning. First minor breach, for example, a low-effort profile that doesn't quite meet the bar. We message you, you fix it, life goes on.
- Temporary suspension. Repeat warnings, confirmed harassment of a single user, or a pattern of bad faith voting. Hours to weeks depending on severity.
- Permanent ban. Confirmed catfishing, sexual content without consent, hate speech, scams, coordinated abuse, ban evasion, anything endangering minors, or repeat suspensions.
- Law enforcement referral. Imminent threats of violence, child-safety violations, romance fraud with financial damage, or anything else that crosses a criminal threshold.
You can appeal an enforcement decision by emailing us. Tell us your account email, what was decided, and why you think it was wrong. We review appeals individually.
How to use the tools
The safety menu (three dots) is everywhere it needs to be , on every pair card in the judge feed, in every chat header, and on every expanded profile. From there:
- Block hides the user from you (and you from them), removes mutual pair cards, and closes any conversation. They're not told.
- Report opens a short form with seven reasons; "Underage user" is treated as urgent.
Full details on what each tool does and what happens after you use it live on the Safety page.