Reddit, the social news site, is encouraging journalists who use it to follow new guidelines on ethical sourcing.

The rules, which the site is calling “pressiquette”, a play on the “Reddiquette” guidelines which all users are expected to follow, tell journalists to “respect the community when sourcing content… remember that each subreddit belongs to its community [and] engage with transparency.”

“If you see an interesting story or photo on reddit, message the redactor who share the piece to ask for their permission prior to using it in an article or list,” the site says.

“Please respect redditors who may wish to stay anonymous, or not be featured in an article.”

Reddit also encourages journalists to “be transparent” in their efforts to generate content, and to make an effort to let redditors connect with their articles “organically”.

In many ways, the rules echo the advice Reddit gives its own users, known as “reddiquette”. Those rules also encourage users to “look for the original source of content” and to “adhere to the same standards of behaviour online that you follow in real life”.

Until an administrator changed the advice in response to questions from the Guardian, however, one rule also encouraged users to “link to the direct version of a media file when the page it was found on doesn’t add any value.”

That practice, known as “hotlinking”, is a common complaint of artists whose work regularly appears on Reddit, since it can send thousands of users to their site without a single one seeing an image credit or advertisement. The rule now only encourages hotlinking “if the page it was found on isn’t the creator’s and doesn’t add additional information or context”.

The rules also clarify the relation Reddit the company has with Reddit the community. The company itself gets asked for permission to use photos on an hourly basis, according to its general manager, despite having no ability to grant that permission, which remains firmly vested in the original poster.

In fact, since Reddit doesn’t host images itself, except for small thumbnail previews, the original picture is always hosted elsewhere – typically Imgur, which began as an image hosting site for Reddit but has now grown into a social network in its own right.

As well as helping media organisations which think that Reddit can grant permission for users’ content, some of the guidance seems to be aimed at sites such as Buzzfeed, which have long been accused of simply trawling Reddit and other social networks for material to post.

On Tuesday, Gawker reported that more than 4,000 BuzzFeed posts have been removed from the site, apparently as part of a drive to remove articles that were, in the words of CEO Jonah Peretti, “trolly” or “poorly sourced”.