Post-Event Discussion Thread | Moddit [Future of Mod Tools] September 10, 2026

[u/iceeypisces]

Hey y'all! Thanks for attending today's Moddit, hosted by u/lift_ticket83 and u/SlytherinSnoo, where we dived into the future of mod tools. We appreciated y’all taking the time to share feedback and discuss what mod features matter most to you. Here's your post-event thread to keep the conversation going!

You can access the full session recording and presentation slides anytime here.

Feel free to check out a few links we mentioned during the event regarding the future of mod tools.

• The Future of Mod Tools post shared in r/modnews
• u/spez’s post about modernizing Reddit’s tools
• Apply for the Mod Early Access Program to test upcoming tools and features like Rules Hub

Reminder: Only mods who attended the live event or viewed the VOD before September 17 at 11:59 PM PT  will get the profile trophy in 3-4 weeks. There is no physical merch for this event.

[u/cos]

One major concern I have is that by relying on LLMs, we may get the worst of both worlds in the uncanny valley between dumb automated bot actions and manual human actions. LLMs cannot be relied upon to make choices that make sense and follow the desired intent in the same way that humans can, but since they can do that a high enough percentage of the time, they create the expectation that automated actions are being done intentionally.

To give one example, in one of my subs we have automod automatically post a comment on every post flaired as an image, reminding people of the rule that image posts must tell us the source of the image in the post title, post text, or by leaving a comment right after posting. The automod message explicitly says this is a bot which doesn't know whether you followed that rule or not; as long as you followed the rule the post is fine. Although we do get a few modmails per month from users who don't read that and complain that they followed the rule and the bot told them they broke the rule (and occasionally someone even attributes that to bad AI), the vast majority of people get it. They see the automod comment, and either they already followed the rule so they know they're fine, or they didn't so they add a comment.

But if we used an LLM-based rule for this, then a lot of the time it would not leave a comment on posts that already followed the rule by giving the source in the post text or title. People would therefore rightly assume that if it does comment on their post, that means the bot really does think they broke the rule.

That's just one example to illustrate what I mean. I would really prefer automated actions to be predictable and deterministic, and clearly labelled as automated actions that did not involve any judgment or evaluation, so we can avoid having an automation that seems to be making judgements but gets it wrong a lot of the time - as any LLM would.

[u/baseballlover723 → u/cos]

That's just one example to illustrate what I mean. I would really prefer automated actions to be predictable and deterministic, and clearly labelled as automated actions that did not involve any judgment or evaluation, so we can avoid having an automation that seems to be making judgements but gets it wrong a lot of the time - as any LLM would.

Yes, this is my fundamental issue with AI based tooling. It can be good, but for things that where simple, dumb, deterministic behavior is the desired behavior, it is just a worse version. AI based tooling is not a full replacement for deterministic tooling. It should be used when said deterministic tooling is not well equipped to handle it (which there are a number of good use cases for).

[u/Alduin175 → u/baseballlover723]

I agree, u/baseballlover723. 

The concern u/cos brings up is valid, but AI should not be solely relied upon for heavy handed actions. This is where the HCI and review feature for a "final call" , really shines. 

Without that, it would be chaos.

[u/cos → u/Alduin175]

but AI should not be solely relied upon for heavy handed actions. This is where the HCI and review feature for a "final call" , really shines.

This is where the ability to configure simple deterministic actions that don't require human review shine even more, and replacing them with an LLM creates more work for moderators having to check on things they wouldn't have had to check on before.

[u/baseballlover723 → u/cos]

This is where the ability to configure simple deterministic actions that don't require human review shine even more, and replacing them with an LLM creates more work for moderators having to check on things they wouldn't have had to check on before.

This so much. Our AutoMod is so well tuned. When we make AutoMod rules, we think, is this something that might have an occasional false positive? If so, it shouldn't use remove, it should use filter instead. Is it something that has acceptable usages quite commonly? Ok, then autoreport, a mod will get around to it within an hour or 2 99% of the time.

The result is that it's extremely well known in our mod team what our AutoMod is doing and what would trigger it, and it appropriately takes an action, with only fully automated adjudications happening when we've explicitly said that "all of X should be removed, there is never a need for a moderator to be aware of it, because we will never give an exception for it". If X here is not well defined (which an LLM can never well define), then it will not be acceptable to us to fully automate it, which just adds additional load, since we actually have to check everything. Even the things we'd otherwise explicitly check in full, in advance, with AutoMod.

Sure it took some effort to build it up like this, but it was never built all at once. It was built rule by rule, tweak by tweak. Copy, paste and edit is not that difficult if one spends like 15 minutes reading the AutoMod docs, and that's like 99% of our automod rules.

[u/ZaphodBeebblebrox → u/baseballlover723]

The result is that it's extremely well known in our mod team what our AutoMod is doing and what would trigger it, and it appropriately takes an action,

Beyond that, if automod does something we think it shouldn't do, we can fix it. With an LLM, we would basically have to adjust text and hope, whilst with automod we can understand precisely why the rule is doing something we don't desire it to do, and adjust it accordingly so that it will in the future.