How do you handle conflicts of interest (personal projects, affiliations) as a mod?

Moderators hold meaningful power over the communities they manage, and conflicts of interest — situations where a moderator's personal financial, professional, or social interests could influence their moderation decisions — are a real and recurring governance challenge. Handling them well requires both personal integrity and transparent structural safeguards. The most straightforward conflict scenario is a moderator who has a personal project, business, or content they want to promote within the community they moderate. The obvious conflict is that the moderator controls whether self-promotional content is approved or removed, which creates an opportunity for favoritism — approving their own content while removing similar content from others, or setting rules that effectively block competition while accommodating their own submissions. The correct response is recusal: removing yourself from any moderation decision that directly affects content you have a personal stake in, disclosing the conflict to the rest of the mod team, and deferring those decisions to colleagues. Affiliations with external communities, companies, or organizations that have interests related to the subreddit you moderate create subtler conflicts. A moderator who is also employed by a brand that is active in the subreddit, or who has close relationships with prominent community members who are also rule-breakers, needs to be especially vigilant about not letting those relationships influence their enforcement decisions. Disclosing known affiliations to the full mod team at the time of recruitment and when new affiliations arise ensures that other team members can provide oversight. Transparency with the community itself is also important for major conflicts. If the mod team has any financial arrangement with a brand that operates in the subreddit, or if a moderator has a disclosed professional affiliation with a major community topic, making that information public in the subreddit wiki demonstrates accountability and allows members to evaluate the mod team's decisions in context. Concealed conflicts, when discovered, are far more damaging to community trust than disclosed ones.