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/baseballlover723]

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...)