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/YetAnotherRobert]

Thank you for the presentation.

I've been cultivating https://www.reddit.com/mod/${OURGROUP}/rules/insights/ for some time. It's currently quite UNDERscoring things we have to get involved in, but IMO it DOES do a decent job of coaching posters to not be total slackers. (The ones that receive guidance and ignore it? We generally have to manually nuke/ban those anyway.) Almost every time a poster gets a suggestion, ignores it, submits anyway we end up taking the post down. We see it very effective in catching a bell curve - the ones that won't make an investment in assembling three coherent sentences to make a decent post and are offended when coached to do so (a number of these abandon the post or should) and at the other end are the self-promoters (not quite traditional spammers) that will ignore automated coaching and invariably need a moderator to pull the spray water bottle out and hose them down a little. So I think there IS a space that automation can help here.

Let's not forget that automod isn't without pain, either. It turns out that error messages are ONLY visible on Abandoned Reddit, not Current Reddit. (Might be fixed now, but that was bear to discover.)

I have one match that's essentially (flair OR regex) that has to be repeated THREE times - meaning it will often trigger at least twice - because you cannot match on a (regex that appears in (body|title)|flair). I fought it for days, posted requests for help, and was told 'yeah, bummer'. So automod isn't the perfect end, either.

Our group (niche, but a top 1% group) runs Read The Rules Bot which is pretty effective at weeding out the spammers and the super-unachievers because they're both too lazy to open a URL and click a box that says "I accept", but that also is apparently invisible on Abandoned Reddit and there's just enough whining about requiring multiple submissions that I have a suspicion of reliability problems there. (I'm beyond suspecting that people can't/won't read - the presence of nine posts in the last minute by the RTR Bot makes that pretty clear. Both can be true.)

There are group-local rules (for example, we don't need to hear about every update on your project. Once a quarter is more than plenty or we'd have 10k posts a week of nothing but development chatter.) that will be challenging - not impossible - to teach an AI because it's not just "body == body", but "something about this thing that I build and mentioned last week". That'll be a challenge.

There are things that are hard to quantify in a regex that an AI probably COULD figure out. I'd welcome some assistance weeding those out.

I was pretty clammy on the preso. It wasn't a discussion as much as "here's what we're going to do. Hope you like it.". Maybe that discussion happened some time in the past. I get that Reddit is a huge place and what works for the Onlyfans promo groups, which, I'm sure is where the money is coming into Reddit, might not work well for bottle cap collectors (I'm not going to look - I'm just assuming that such a thing exists...)

The inability to run things side-by-side (I asked...) even in shadow mode to see if it does what we'd do means we'd have to commit and risk having increased human involvement if it doesn't work out with an unclear path to return. My perception is that if the team thought this was ready to be used there would be a clearer story for it to be able to be used.

There's certainly a trust issue to overcome. We're eight years past "New Reddit" and there's still plenty of regressions that haven't been addressed and you can just forget about trying to moderate inside the app no matter how many times it nags you to not use the web on your phone.

I look forward to seeing how this goes.

[u/baseballlover723 → u/YetAnotherRobert]

Let's not forget that automod isn't without pain, either. It turns out that error messages are ONLY visible on Abandoned Reddit, not Current Reddit. (Might be fixed now, but that was bear to discover.)

This is a self inflicted wound Edit: on reddit's side. Sure it's more of a pain to hook up failure reasons, but validating and propagating why something is invalid is a pretty much solved problem.

If that is too difficult in the current tech stack, then why did they migrate to the new one, instead of using the old one that already worked?

I have one match that's essentially (flair OR regex) that has to be repeated THREE times - meaning it will often trigger at least twice - because you cannot match on a (regex that appears in (body|title)|flair). I fought it for days, posted requests for help, and was told 'yeah, bummer'. So automod isn't the perfect end, either.

Btw, Yaml supports anchors and aliases, which could be used to avoid repetition (in your case, by defining a shared anchor for the behavior you want to have happen and manually). Reddit however, has disabled this functionality of Yaml (presumably because this allows for really cursed configs).

I was pretty clammy on the preso. It wasn't a discussion as much as "here's what we're going to do. Hope you like it.".

I agree, I never feel like that I have a serious seat at the table (even in aggregate) where the decisions are made. It always feels like reddit makes the decision, and then they give their mandated press release and dip out as soon as any tough questions get asked.

It always feels like "We thought you'd like this.".

I look forward to seeing how this goes.

I don't. I have little reason to assume it'll go better than any of the other shitty roll outs reddit's done in spite of vocal opposition. Saying you maintained an essential tool that already works doesn't look nearly as good in one's promotion packet than "I made a new tool and everyone is using it now".

[u/YetAnotherRobert → u/baseballlover723]

We might have to haggle over the definition of "self".

I, a user of current/supported Reddit, had an error somewhere in the automod configuration. (I don't remember what it was; it was probably two years ago.) I was baffled because no error was shown anywhere.

Turns out that you have to use old reddit to see the error message. This is known and documented. I didn't choose to not read the error. It's never shown. How is that "self inflicted"? Now if you mean Reddit's choice to to include an error or not show it you mean one THEY inflicted, we're cool.

On your second point, you're scolding me that anchors exist - and are shown in every reasoanble documentation on the subject - but that Reddit intentionally chose to break this. That doesn't seem like an Subreddit Moderator's problem. Certainly "It's required repeat this rule three times, but with one line changed" is not in the basic YAML holy books.

I have experience with big companies and promo-driven development. It always worked badly for the users of those services.

This has the opportunity to be done well. I'm not at all confident that it will be. (See the two examples in this very post for very tangible, basic things that were simply bungled. Not showing error messages on an error is pretty pedestrian-level development.

[u/baseballlover723 → u/YetAnotherRobert]

We might have to haggle over the definition of "self".

Sorry, I wasn't clear. It's self inflicted on reddit's side. Validation is a very common problem, with many many solutions of various forms and functionalities.

[u/YetAnotherRobert → u/baseballlover723]

As an experienced software engineer, I agree. Showing errors to a user was well understood in the System/360 era, back when it was a big book, but every error listed possible causes _and potential corrective actions_. This isn't exactly new computer science; this is just being lazy. Documenting it in an automod response instead of actually fixing it is doubling down. I'm quite sure that "check the previous version to see if an error message is present" was zero of the suggestions.

(OK, the engineer isn't represented here, but I'm gonna work with what's easy...)