r/googlehome: rules, karma requirements and posting culture

Who posts here

Most posts are from ordinary owners whose speaker, hub or doorbell stopped doing something, described in plain words with no logs. Basic questions get answered, usually with "same here" and a reboot suggestion, even though the rules say to read the FAQ first. A minority of threads go further into Matter, routine scripts and self-hosted workarounds, and those assume you know what the terms mean.

• Household owners of Nest speakers, hubs, doorbells and cameras with something that stopped working.
• Long-time users, some with a decade of devices, who are angry about the move from Assistant to Gemini.
• Tinkerers writing automations, bridging other brands in, or moving to locally hosted alternatives.
• Subscribers confused by changes to storage and camera history plans.
• A few developers sharing small tools that restore a feature Google removed.

Karma and account requirements

What it takes to get a post through in r/googlehome.

What you can post

What happens to a new post

Where the most recent posts ended up. Sample size: 400.

• Stayed up88%
• Removed by Reddit's filters12%
• Removed by moderators<1%
• Deleted by the author<1%

Reddit counts a removal by the subreddit's own AutoModerator rules as a moderator removal, so that share is not all human. Held by AutoModerator means the post is waiting in the mod queue.

What happened when we posted here

We have posted here ourselves. This is how our own posts and comments fared.

Stayed up

100%

Removed by Reddit's filters

0%

Removed by moderators

0%

Period

March 2026 to July 2026

The rules, in the mods' words

1. 1

   Remember the Human

   It's the first rule of reddiquette for a reason. Keep in mind that on the other side of each post is a real person whom you've just met. Err on the side of giving everyone the benefit of the doubt. tldr: don't be a dick

2. 2

   Sharing your project is cool. Spam is not cool

   You know the difference.

3. 3

   To avoid duplicate topics, use the Search to check recent posts.

   Tech support is permissible within certain bounds. Please search the subreddit before posting.

These are the rules as archived in January 2025. Rules change. Check the sidebar before you post.

The culture

r/googlehome is a user-run support room for Google's smart speakers, displays, doorbells and cameras. The wiki says twice that it is not Google customer service. Two thirds of posts are text, around 80 words, describing a device that has started misbehaving and asking if anyone else is seeing it.

The mood is the story. Almost every popular post in our data is a complaint: the assistant no longer understands simple commands, the app is a mess, a paid plan quietly lost its camera history, someone has unplugged the last of their speakers after ten years. Gemini replacing the old Assistant is the fault line, and nearly everyone here is on the same side of it. Comments regularly mention moving to Home Assistant or to cameras that record locally.

Moderation is light. The written rules ban rants, low effort posts and "look what it did" screenshots, but those are exactly what rises, and they stay up. Moderators removed about 0.3% of our sample by hand.

What lands

• A screenshot or short account of the assistant getting something simple badly wrong. The top post in our data is one of these and passed 580 points.
• A practical tip that fixes a daily annoyance, like a phrase that stops the speaker announcing what it is about to play.
• A clear report of a new bug with the device model and when it started. These collect "same here" replies with locations, which is how people confirm an outage.
• A heads-up about a subscription or feature change that others have not noticed yet.
• A solved post: a working method for something fiddly, such as separate on and off commands for a TV through an IR blaster.

What gets removed or ignored

• Very little is removed by moderators. We saw one hand removal in the sample and our data does not show why.
• Reddit's own filters removed about 12% of posts. That usually happens before a moderator sees the post.
• Referral, affiliate and self-promotion links, which the rules say are removed without notice.
• Short links. The rules call this zero tolerance and say repeat offenders are banned.
• For-sale and trade posts. The rules send those to swap subreddits.

The unwritten rules

• Give the model and generation, what changed, and when. "Hub gen 2, started after the router swap" gets answers. "Google is broken" gets agreement and nothing else.
• Do not defend Google unless you can back it up. An official support reply asking a user to file feedback was met with a comment saying it is not the customer's job to fix the product.
• Recommending a competitor is normal here. People name the cameras and hubs they switched to and nobody treats it as off topic.
• Many replies are a single line of shared experience. Do not expect a deep diagnosis: a typical post gets four comments.
• A developer answering a complaint with a tool they built is tolerated when they say it is theirs and ask what people want from it. One did exactly that in a thread about a removed news feature and held back from repeating the link.

Self-promotion

The rule is one line: sharing your project is cool, spam is not, and you know the difference. The wiki adds that referral, affiliate and other self-promotion links are removed without notice and repeat offenders may be banned, and that surveys, AMAs and giveaways need moderator approval first. In practice a small project that solves a real Google Home problem gets through. A link post for a self-hosted tool that brought back a grocery list integration stayed up in our sample. The line is whether the thing helps owners with their devices or just sells to them.

How people write here

Typical post length

81 words

Typical title length

7 words

Titles phrased as a question

24%

Typical comment length

23 words

Comments that include a link

5%

Posts that carry a flair

46%

Top keywords

The words and phrases that show up far more often here than in other communities, from recent posts in r/googlehome.

• google home 153 posts
• google 250 posts
• nest 92 posts
• home 198 posts
• gemini 78 posts
• google nest 36 posts
• devices 72 posts
• home app 50 posts
• nest hub 30 posts
• hey google 26 posts
• hub 50 posts
• google assistant 21 posts
• device 58 posts
• speaker 38 posts
• wifi 34 posts
• app 86 posts
• assistant 45 posts
• speakers 27 posts
• nest mini 14 posts
• doorbell 23 posts
• reset 30 posts
• smart 37 posts
• mini 30 posts
• factory reset 16 posts
• phone 48 posts
• lights 29 posts
• music 31 posts
• home speaker 13 posts
• home mini 11 posts
• play 42 posts
• voice 34 posts
• screen 33 posts
• google tv 11 posts
• connected 29 posts
• home devices 14 posts
• camera 25 posts
• gen 21 posts
• alexa 13 posts
• playing 28 posts
• settings 25 posts

Recurring topics: google, home, google home, nest, devices, app, google nest, gemini, nest hub, wifi.

Growth

1. 20169.2k
2. 201740k
3. 201885k
4. 2019134k
5. 2020277k
6. 2021525k
7. 2022711k
8. 2023745k
9. 2024821k
10. 2025878k
11. 2026889k

Related subreddits

• r/business
• r/Entrepreneur
• r/SaaS
• r/adhdwomen
• r/ChristianDating
• r/GeminiAI
• r/dji
• r/cats
• r/workout
• r/ChronicIllness

Common questions