Reddit Add Poll: Steps From Reddit's Own Help Pages
Reddit's add poll flow works only in the official Reddit apps. Tap the Create icon or the pencil button, select Poll as the post type, then write a title and add up to six options. The mobile website cannot create polls at all.
Written by BuyPollVotes editorial desk | Last checked
Start with an account and a community
Voting, commenting, and posting on Reddit all sit behind one gate: an account. Reddit's sign-up help page says so directly, and the composer is no exception. A community is the usual home for a post of this kind, and Reddit's community guide walks through its setup. Click Create Community on the left-hand sidebar of the home feed, choose a name, and add a description. Up to three topics help Reddit connect the new space with relevant audiences faster, and the visibility choice decides who reaches it.
One special case sits on old Reddit. Only Reddit Premium members can create, view, and participate in Premium-only communities, and that option exists only there. Everyone else finishes the ordinary flow with a final click of Create Community. For a first-time organizer, the plain public community is the straightforward choice: the vote reaches whoever joins or browses, and nothing is gated behind a subscription.
It pays to settle the community question before touching the composer, because the composer asks where the post belongs the moment the type is chosen. A person who already moderates or regularly posts in a space knows its mood; a newcomer does not, and the fastest way to find out is to read what that space has already posted. Communities with steady post activity handle a question-and-answers format well. Quiet ones may leave a fresh vote sitting at zero for days, which says nothing about the question and everything about the audience size.
- Name and description are the fields the community guide asks for at setup, so decide them before the first vote goes up.
- An icon and a banner are optional, and a bare-bones space is ready faster without them.
- Public, restricted, and private are the three visibility choices, and the one picked shapes who ever sees what gets posted there.
Where the poll option lives
The poll option is not everywhere on Reddit. The platform's own documentation on how to make polls draws a hard line: polls can only be created from the official Reddit apps. The mobile website is named explicitly as unsupported, which surprises plenty of people who open the site in a phone browser, tap around the composer, and find no poll type anywhere. Nothing in that documentation describes a second route, so the app is not the recommended path but the only one the company admits to.
Once the create screen is open, the flow itself is short. Select Poll as the post type, and the composer changes shape to take a question and options. That is the whole reddit add poll sequence: app, composer, Poll, options, submit.
The browser restriction has a practical consequence worth stating plainly. A person who plans posts on a laptop, drafts the question in a notes file, and schedules around a busy week cannot carry any of that into the composer on the desktop site. The drafting can happen anywhere; the assembly happens in the app. Treating the app as the workshop and everything else as the planning desk saves a frustrating ten minutes of hunting for an option that is not there.
- Official Reddit apps: the only creation route the documentation allows.
- Mobile website: creation is explicitly not supported, in Reddit's own words.
- A desktop browser: the poll documentation describes no path here at all.
On the mobile app: pencil and Create
Two buttons get a phone user into the composer. One is the pencil button in the bottom bar, which starts a new post directly. The other is the Create icon, which on iOS and Android sits at the bottom of the screen, or inside a community when the person is already browsing one. Either route lands on the same screen, so the choice is habit, not mechanics.
From there, pick the post type. The list Reddit's posting guide gives covers link, image, video, poll, and AMA, and choosing the poll entry turns the form into a vote. The other four types stay available in the same composer, which is why a misplaced tap is the most common way a question ends up as an ordinary text post.
The same buttons behave slightly differently depending on where the person starts. Inside a community, the Create icon already knows the destination, so the community picker step disappears. From the home feed, the composer asks where the post should go before it asks what it should be. Neither order changes what gets filled in, but knowing which screen comes first is the difference between a smooth first attempt and a loop of back-taps.
Title, description, and six options
Two fields are not optional. Reddit's posting guide requires a title and a description for the post, and the poll form is no different: the title carries the question, the description carries whatever context the voters need. Then come the answer options. Six is the ceiling the poll documentation sets, so a question with seven angles has to lose one before submission.
The limit shapes good questions more than it constrains them. Two or three options read faster for voters; six exists for genuine either-of-six cases, like naming a favorite from a shortlist. Whatever the count, each option is a plain text line, and the documentation adds nothing about images or formatting for them.
A question written for six slots reads differently from one written for two. Short-answer questions reward the narrow count: voters scan, choose, and move on, and the result is a clear split rather than a smear across half-a-dozen lines. Broader surveys of taste need the full spread, and the honest cost is a result where no single option dominates. Neither shape is wrong; the mistake is writing a two-choice question and padding it to six because the slots were there.
Choosing where the vote belongs
Reddit's documentation does not rank communities, and it should not: the right destination depends entirely on the question. A vote about a game belongs with the people who play that game, and a vote about a hobby belongs with the community built around it. What the help pages do establish is the frame: every community carries one of three visibility settings, and that setting, not the composer, decides who can ever reach the ballot.
The visibility choice does more work than newcomers expect. Public means anyone on the platform can view and join. Restricted lets anyone view but narrows participation, which suits a space run by a team with a clear membership. Private closes both doors, and a vote posted there is seen only by the people already inside. A person planning a serious tally should match the setting to the audience on purpose, because moving a post after the fact is not something the documentation describes.
- A community the person already posts in: the audience is known and the rules are known.
- A large public community: reach is wide, but the post competes with everything else on the feed.
- A small or new community: the vote is seen by fewer people, yet every one of them is more likely to answer.
After submit: what the help pages cover
The documentation goes quiet at the moment of submission. It says what a poll must contain and where one can be created, and it stops there. No guidance on editing, no statement about how long the vote stays open as a default, no description of what the result screen shows to voters versus the person who created it. Those gaps are the honest boundary of the official pages, and a person who needs certainty about any of them has to observe their own post after it goes live.
The fake-vote worry has a short, factual answer from the same rows. Voting needs a signed-in account, so every entry in a tally traces back to an account holder. That sign-in requirement is the one mechanism the help pages name, and they describe nothing else standing behind the numbers. Anyone weighing whether outside help can distort a result should read that sentence the other way round: the platform ties each choice to a signed-in identity, and the documentation names no exemption from that rule.
One more boundary matters to organizers. Nothing in the rows here covers moderation tools, removal, or what a community's own team can do with a post after it is live. Reddit's help pages for moderators are a separate body of documentation, and this page stays inside the four it was built on. Where a community's rules and the platform's mechanics meet, the community's own rules govern posting, and reading them before posting is the cheapest insurance available.
| Setting | What Reddit's documentation says |
|---|---|
| Creation surface | Official apps only; the mobile website is not supported |
| Option count | Up to six answer options |
| Required fields | A title and a description are required |
| Community visibility | Public, restricted, or private |
| Premium-only communities | Premium members only, and only on old Reddit |
| Editing after posting | Not described in the poll documentation |
| Default open duration | Not described in the poll documentation |
How to do it
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Have an account ready
Reddit's sign-up page says an account is needed to engage with the community through posting, commenting, or voting. Without one, the composer never opens.
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Tap the Create icon
On iOS and Android, tap the Create icon at the bottom of the screen, or inside a community. On the mobile app, the pencil button in the bottom bar starts a new post too.
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Pick Poll as the type
After the create screen opens, select Poll from the list of post types, which also covers link, image, video, and AMA posts.
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Title, description, then options
Reddit requires a title and a description for the post. Put the question in the title, the context in the description, then add the answer options, up to six in total.
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Pick the community and submit
Choose where it goes. Communities on Reddit are public, restricted, or private, and the audience picked decides who can vote.
Common questions
How to do a poll on Reddit?
Tap the Create icon in the official Reddit app, select Poll as the post type, write a title, and add up to six options. Reddit's help pages list no other route: the mobile website does not support creating one. Choose the community, and the post goes live to whoever that community admits.
How to make a poll on Reddit mobile?
On iOS and Android, tap the Create icon at the bottom of the screen, or the pencil button in the bottom bar, then select Poll from the list of post types. Making one through the mobile website is not supported, in Reddit's own words.
How to post a Reddit poll?
A poll post needs a title and a description before it goes anywhere, and it carries up to six options. Pick the community, check the visibility setting, and submit. Reddit's documentation does not describe an editing step after that.
Can you add a poll on Reddit from a web browser?
No. Reddit's help page states that polls can only be created from the official Reddit apps, and it names the mobile website as unsupported. A browser on a phone is exactly the case that documentation rules out, so install the app before starting.
How many options can a Reddit poll have?
Six, at most. Reddit's poll documentation sets six as the upper limit for answer options, so plan the question around a half-dozen choices or fewer. Nothing in the help pages describes a way to extend the list once the post is live.
Can a poll go into any community on Reddit?
Yes, as far as Reddit's documentation goes: the poll type belongs to the same composer as any other post, so any community a person can post in accepts one. What varies is the audience. Public, restricted, and private communities reach different people, and only Premium members can enter Premium-only communities on old Reddit.
Where these facts come from
- Reddit. reddit.com/r/polls/wiki/index/how-to-make-polls/.
- Reddit. reddit.com/r/polls/wiki/index/how-to-make-polls/.
- Reddit. reddit.com/r/polls/wiki/index/how-to-make-polls/.
- support.reddithelp.com. support.reddithelp.com/hc/en-us/articles/360060422572-How-do-I-post-and-comment-on-Reddit.
- support.reddithelp.com. support.reddithelp.com/hc/en-us/articles/360060422572-How-do-I-post-and-comment-on-Reddit.
No page here can make a tally come out a certain way, and none tries: Reddit decides who votes and how the numbers appear, and nothing changes that. The site does not sell votes for this platform on this page, does not teach ways around Reddit's limits, and never claims anything slips past a platform's checks. What a reader gets is the documented mechanics, the documented limits, and an honest account of what the help pages leave unsaid.
X prohibits coordinating with or compensating others to inflate engagement metrics, and it names Polls among the features covered. The Pet Industry Business Awards name the consequence in their own contest: a business may be investigated, lose votes or be disqualified on reasonable evidence of purchased votes. No seller can stop an organiser from doing that.
Slido says it is alerted when an event gets an unusually high number of votes in a very short time, and Crowdsignal says its built-in measures detect patterns of potentially abusive voting. Ordinary participation arrives spread across the voting window, from different people at different moments. Nothing on this site is a method for getting a vote past a check, and a vote that a tool blocks does not count.
Organiser rules differ: the RSPCA Pet of the Year Awards allow extra votes through donations on their official mechanism, while OpenTable Australia treats a vote cast in exchange for money or a reward as null and void. Both are contest rules, not statutes, and whether payment is lawful where you live is a question for a lawyer. Orders are refused for any contest whose rules ban paid votes, and for political ballots.
Votes ordered for a poll that never appear on its count are refunded after the poll closes. A refund never covers an organiser's decision: Localsearch may void all votes for a disqualified nominee, and Mentimeter says a user whose access it cancels under its Acceptable Use Policy is owed no refund or compensation. No result is promised.