How do you decide which post types to allow (images, links, polls, etc.)?

Reddit gives moderators granular control over which submission formats — text posts, link posts, image posts, video posts, and polls — are available to members. The right configuration depends on the community's purpose and the quality of contribution you are trying to cultivate. Text posts are the backbone of discussion-oriented communities. They invite long-form sharing, detailed questions, and thoughtful writeups that generate substantive comment threads. Communities centered on advice, analysis, creative writing, or professional knowledge almost always benefit from prioritizing text posts. When a community permits only text, it signals that depth of thought is valued over quick link-sharing. Link posts are valuable when the community's primary activity is curating external content — news aggregators, technology subreddits, and communities that follow a particular industry frequently use link posts as the primary format. The risk of allowing link posts without guardrails is that they encourage passive consumption rather than active discussion, since members click through to external content rather than engaging in the comments. Some communities address this by requiring a comment from the poster explaining the significance of the link before it is approved. Image and video posts drive high engagement and are essential for communities built around visual content — art, photography, gaming screenshots, food, DIY projects — but they often suppress text-based discussion because upvoting an image requires less friction than reading and responding to a text post. In communities where discussion quality matters, limiting or disabling image posts prevents the subreddit from devolving into a gallery where nobody talks. Polls are a useful but situational tool. They are well suited for periodic temperature-checks, gathering quick opinions, or running community votes, but enabling polls universally leads to trivial polling posts ("What's your favorite X?") that generate little meaningful conversation. Most communities treat polls as a moderator-initiated event rather than a broadly available submission type. The decision framework is simple: enable only the post types that serve the kind of content the community is built around, and be willing to restrict types that generate low-quality submissions even if they are popular. Start restrictively and loosen permissions as you observe what members actually need.