Community Participation Guidelines

Why this page exists

Coterie is built around genuine professional communities — groups of people who share their work, discover what others are creating, and show up for each other consistently. It is not a tool for coordinating artificial activity on any social platform, and it isn't meant to be run as one.

To keep every Coterie a place people actually trust, there's one rule that applies to every community on the platform, regardless of niche, size or branding.

The core rule

Coterie tracks participation inside the platform — completing a review, contributing to a session, showing up consistently — never actions taken on an external platform. What a member does after discovering someone else's work (reading it, replying to it, sharing it, or nothing at all) is always their own choice.

This isn't a limitation of the product. It's a deliberate line Coterie won't cross, and it's the line every community owner agrees to respect when they set up their own rules.

Community owners have real freedom to shape their Coterie — content channels, session cadence, niche definitions, strike thresholds, and more. That freedom does not extend to requiring members to take specific actions on the platforms where their content is published.

What owners must not require of members

Regardless of your own settings and rules, a Coterie may never require members to:

• Like, comment on, share, follow, repost or otherwise interact with a specific piece of content on an external platform as a condition of earning contribution, reliability or continued membership
• Post a specific comment, phrase or amount of text on someone's content
• Provide proof (screenshots or otherwise) that they performed an action on an external platform
• Engage with content in a way timed or coordinated to influence a platform's algorithm or visibility metrics
• Use multiple accounts, or coordinate with other members outside the platform, to boost a submission's reach
• Be penalized in contribution, reliability or standing for choosing not to take any particular action on the destination platform

What Coterie communities are for

None of this limits what a genuine community can do. Members are free to leave real feedback, start real conversations, and support each other's work in whatever way feels authentic to them — that's the entire point of joining one. The guideline exists to keep that support genuine rather than manufactured, and to keep every Coterie clearly on the right side of platforms' own policies on coordinated activity.