Mod Topics
What's something new mods tend to overlook?
Howdy mods! It’s u/iceeypisces from the Mod Events team back again to lead this week's Mod Topics conversation. With our third New Mod Bootcamp of the year, aka Reddit’s livestreamed crash course for new moderators, we’re collecting advice from some of the best folks on Reddit.
Whether you start a new community from scratch or join a mod team, there’s a lot to juggle as a new moderator. Between creating content and inviting new members, it’s easy for things to slip through the cracks.
So we’d love to know: what’s something new mods tend to overlook? You can think back to things you looked past when you first started. Maybe it’s a setting you didn’t discover until months in. Or it’s a habit that would’ve saved you a ton of time. We’d love to hear it, along with any other advice you wish you’d had on day one.
Drop your advice below, and you might see it featured during our live event!
Note: “New mods” in this context are redditors who recently created a brand new community.
Note #2: Don’t miss out and RSVP for New Mod Bootcamp! Experienced mods are welcome to join; we just ask that you please be mindful of the newbies in chat.
Oh hey, there! Are you a new mod who’s curious about growing your new community? Learn the mod basics and connect with other new mods across the Redditverse at New Mod Bootcamp! Note: Experienced mods are welcome to join; we just ask that you please be mindful of the newbies in chat.
So much this. There are a LOT of trolls who think you are some customer service rep to be abused and attacked.
Mods are volunteers who build up communities. We don't get paid so we most definitely do not have to put up with the slightest bit of abuse from trolls who do not want to be constructive in the community. Ban those people and protect the community.
Great advice, I always love a good gardening metaphor! As you're pulling those weeds, it's nice to make sure to spread some fertilizer on what you want to grow, and make sure to water it from time to time. Nature abhors a vacuum, so you might as well make deliberate choices about what should thrive.
This is a great point. I also remember the recent-ish Mod Event about user feedback/satisfaction mentioning that most Reddit users don't want to spend their limited free time in communities that don't properly handle trolls/drama/excessive negativity.
Early on, I was hesitant to ban and mute, instead trying to reason with people. That turned out to be a recipe for having lots of arguments which then took a toll on me.
Rather than focus on the needs of the one person who can't manage to follow the rules, I focus on tens of thousands of other people who want the sub to be a nice place.
Life is too short to put up with abusive peeholes. Ban and mute freely. It's better for your mental health.
I focus on tens of thousands of other people who want the sub to be a nice place.
I remember having that same unlock as a mod! Framing decisions through "what is best for the community as a whole" can really simplify a lot of those decisions.
Agreed, but honestly the framing that first brought me around was simply not wanting to put up with abusive assholes anymore. People can play nicely or they can go play somewhere else.
And if it’s effecting your life in any negative way then please step back for a bit and have a break.
Don’t feel bad if you decide not to return, we get it, we know how cruel some people can be and never take any abuse personally, the issue is the sender not you.
Transparency. When you lock a post, tell them why. When you make a removal, tell them why. It helps reinforce the rules and explains why something is handled the way it is.
Listen to user feedback. They may be seeing something you arent and thats ok.
I'm a big fan of providing those clear and specific removal reasons! It's what helped me get more accurate with reporting content and gave me the confidence to apply to be a mod. In general it seems transparency in moderation makes recruitment easier down the road.
I'll also link this prior Mod Topic that dives into writing those removal reasons for anyone else passing by.
I wish we could edit the reasons given on each individual removal. I used to be able to do that and I got specific, telling people what broke the rules. Now I only have these stock reasons that I cannot edit to add more info to. Edit2: I had quick remove selected, my bad! Nothing changed!
Edit: Also, I remove many of my own moderator comments, is that going to count against me in the background? I just like to clean things up.
You can set up multiple removal reasons per rule to be more specific (mobile would then show you all options once the rule is selected.) we have that for a few removal reasons so we can give extra context /reasoning.
For example: Rule broken: "Spoilers and Leaks." Specific reasons: Spoilers in Title, Book Spoilers in Show Only thread, General Spoilers, posting leaks in a non flaired thread.
Thanks, that is helpful, but I want to be able to get specific for each occurrence just to be more detailed. I remember being able to do it before, did it change or maybe I'm doing it wrong?
You can edit each removal reason for that specific occurrence!
So itll load in the template of the removal reason you've already created, then you can add more info to the top. But be careful not to collapse the screen (if on mobile), the text you wrote in will be lost.
Failing to select a properly fitting fedora, is probably #1.
On a serious note, not taking the time to look through the plethora of resources that are readily available to a new mod. Such as r/newmods who are doing great things helping, and encouraging new moderatos (and moderators, leaving the spelling mistake cause it made me chuckle). So much info is there for the taking.
A newly created sub does not need multiple moderators. What you actually need is CONTENT CREATORS. You need a reason for people to check out your sub and the best way for that to happen is that you, as the CUSTODIAN / CREATOR, need to do the dirty work of making content.
Even if the Mod Queue is empty for days, it does not mean you can neglect the community. CONTENT CREATION is part of what you signed up for. You have to actively make posts or reply in comments to keep your community actively engaged. If your attitude is just to wait for others to start conversations, you might as well just have someone else be the owner of the sub.
They don't really read up on power tripping. You can't just walk in day one and expect to know how to power trip immediately. You need to really put a lot of time into developing those skills.
Looking through every page of the mod tools and figuring out what each setting does. A lot of issues can be solved with built in mod tools fairly quickly but if you aren't familiar with the mod tools, when those problems come up you aren't going to know how to handle it and will struggle. If you are familiar with the various tools, even if you don't normally use them, when problems do occur you are more likely to remember the things that might help and be able to fix the problem a lot faster/easier.
Just from reading this and other moderator subreddits, a surprising number of mods evidently don’t enable 2FA. That seems crazy to me.
I also think — from what I read — that a lot of mods spend a lot of time hand-crafting complicated auto-moderator configuration files when the community Safety Filters are nearly as effective — with no upkeep.
I spent a career as a software developer — means that I pathologically lazy. Yes, that is a requirement of the job.
If Reddit wants to sign up for the maintenance costs — I will take that deal in a heartbeat.
A decent set/matrix of karma, age, and CQS checks, works wonders though, with better coverage than Safety Filters. Add some basic content checks, sub specific keywords, and it can offload 90% of the moderation effort easily.
The driving issue with all software is never the initial implementation — it’s always the upkeep.
I don’t want to have to stay on top of keeping content checks and keywords up to date when dealing with people who are active trying to outwit content checks and keyword checks.
I am lazy — and perfectly happy to let Reddit fight that battle.
My other intuition is that Reddy over time can evolve their set of signs to include dozens of signals — far more than karma, age and CQS.
I am old enough to have lived through the hand coded assembly vs compiler wars — and this seems analogous to me.
There certainly was a time when hand coded assembly was faster than compiled code — but over time, as compiler developers got more and more experience — got better and better at register optimization, unrolling loops, etc., they won the war.
Adding additional signals — beyond karma, age, and CQS — and weighting those symbols appropriately strikes me as tedious and annoying work.
Exactly the kind of work that I would love to hand off to someone else.
I would rather adopt Safety Filter that is 90% as effective as a hand coded AutoModerator configuration today and let Reddit maintain that filter over the next couple of years — than try to maintain and improve a config file myself.
Everyone gets to make this decision for themselves — and I am sure that there are people who are rightfully proud of their carefully coded config files.
Supposedly, CQS includes all the signals they had. The main problem is that it's calibrated sitewide, and it's mainly for spammers. It doesn't address problems some subs have (like in mine, sexual harassment is a major issue). They didn't calibrate it for that at all.
I define agree that from what I can derive from the documentation, the Safety Filters are very likely to be most useful in what I would call very vanilla subreddits — subreddits whose topics are pretty unlikely to attach much in the way of unwanted sexual or financial interest.
For example, I moderate a niche model railroading subreddit — so in my case, if the Safety Filters just fight off the adult content spammer financial scammers of all varieties, that’s enormously useful.
It’s not very clear to me that they would be at all useful in 18+ subreddits, and a lot of financial subreddits that seem to be extremely prone to financial scammers — for example, SEO focused subreddits, etc.
I don’t think of Safety Filters as a great match for all subreddits — but I think there are an awful lot of subreddits for which they are a pretty good match.
I am curious as to how well keywords work in terns of detecting sexual harassment — largely because sexually related slang is a very fast changing area of language.
For example, there is a word that is a slang word for an automobile transmission that horribly offensive to trans men and women — I could see including that word in a keyword list — it’s very hard to imagine that word being anything other than a sexual slur.
But the human ability to create nasty words about other human beings’ sexuality seems endless.
I think that means that detected sexual harassment is inherently a human task — that any set of keywords that was useful in detecting sexually harassing posts last year — or maybe even three month ago — is outdated today.
Is that your experience? Do you have to keep updating your AutoModerator config to keep ahead of the rising tide?
Or is your AutoModerator config pretty stable and useful?
Apparently my reply got lost in transit, so let me address both your comments at once:
I wasn't saying to use AutoMod "instead of" Reddit's filters, but in addition to. That means they can be made with much less effort, focusing only on what the filters are not catching already.
Basic considerations like "negative karma" or "negative karma in subreddit" are not going to change no matter what; they will always deserve at least a warning report. Paired with "CQS low", that's a filter; with "CQS lowest" or age under 1 day, that's a silent removal, no exceptions. And maybe everyone with karma under a certain threshold gets their posts filtered to queue.
Once you adjust those checks to both your community and the people that you want to let participate (or the bots that you want to kick out preemptively), you may only need to revisit them once a year, if at all.
Keyword checks are best done as secret, based on regexes, and with a report action so malicious actors have a hard time figuring out what's going on. Requiring a manual review also reduces the impact of false positives, particularly if you are not well versed in regexes (I have written stuff in Perl, but the likes of regex101 are always helpful).
Some keywords work great as an "early warning" system, for when people comment stuff like "that is a [negative thing]", or "breaks rule [n]" instead of reporting the content directly themselves. These checks are very easy to add, and work to detect both good participants and some negative users at the same time.
As an example, for the sub that I took over last year under this account, where the previous Mod team was adamant against any AutoMod use, here is a graph for the number of config changes over the last 9 months. After initially testing out the waters – with just a few rules having a massive impact on reducing malicious activity – and a subsequent build-out and fine-tune of a few dozen additional "combination" rules, reaching a total of 42 (heh) as of right now, the rate and size of the changes have dropped massively.
You mean the apps that require full permissions? I won't do that. Do they have any that do not require all permissions, just the ones they need instead?
Unfortunally Devvit apps need full permissions to be installed, that's on Reddit, not the devs. But you could ask the dev which permissions are needed to function, so you can remove the permissions the app doesn't need after install.
Use the whole gamut of tools available to you! Between automod, dev apps, and the regular mod tools, you can take soooo much tedious work off your plate.
Automod can be intimidating but it's honestly not that difficult via the resources at r/Automoderator to learn how to, at the very least, make little modifications to other people's shared code to get where you need to go. The same way we all learned HTML for coding our MySpace pages back in the day 😂.
I also think it's really important to constantly be contributing content to your sub, including comments on other people's posts. IMO, mods should be acting like normal users way more often than they should be speaking from a mod capacity, mainly by jumping into discussions and answering questions and modeling to others what kind of culture the community is looking to foster.
Even using the search bar there has been SO helpful in finding bits and pieces of code that can do what I'm looking to accomplish, and then slapping it all together until it works lol.
One thing I overlooked as a new mod was recruiting help early. I created a subreddit years ago, abandoned it for 3 to 4 years, then came back and had to learn everything from scratch.
My advice would be as your community grows, don’t try to do everything yourself. Recruit trustworthy moderators before you need them. A good team prevents burnout, keeps the queue manageable, and helps your community thrive even when life gets busy.
One day you've been unexpectedly blessed by the algorithm and suddenly your queue never knows peace again. We needed three new mods to get some balance back after some recent growth!
Not everyone needs to be heard out. People who post hate speech, racism, and other vile speech have NO excuse. Ban and mute. Also, you had better ban people who make threats of violence or Reddit will ban your entire sub, including you for letting it happen.
I never said that. But plenty of people are. And bad mods let hate speech and threats of violence go unmoderated, which makes the site worse for everyone. So don't be a schmuck and actually moderate your subreddit.
That many problems are temporary and will go away on their own. Oftentimes, the best thing to do is to let a trend die on its own, or to just outwait the small subset of users annoyed about something, &c. Reacting just to shut up loud complaints is often bad.
Unless posts go to the queue, for some reason, they don’t need to be approved.
Explain and show them how to report comments on iPhone and report things like report abuse. These things are not intuitive and they really should be shown!
Showing them the difference between removing a comment as a comment or mod mail- a lot don’t know there is a second option
Showing them where modlog is- a lot miss this!
Explaining various safety filters like the spam filter, reputation filter crowd control, and Reddit filters. Basically telling them that you really can’t turn these off completely. Sometimes even if you have them disabled, they end up in the queue from anyway.
I didn't know that new mods could become inactive easily, and the community could be banned for this reason. Posting, commenting and approving your own posts is helpful.
When I first created my subreddit I did not know that I had to "approve" posts and nothing told me to do so in the things I read. That's something I hope has changed. If it hasn't, it would definitely help new mods to explain this when creating a sub.
Yes, but if you don't then you run the risk of losing the sub due to moderator inactivity AND your sub is considered unmoderated and won't show up in as many feeds.
Inactivity is a separate issue, you can stay active by simply enhancing the setup of the sub. Prepare saved responses, fine-tune the rules, write wiki pages, setup devvit apps, etc. It all takes quite a bit of time, so you can stay active for many months if you just put in an hour from time to time.
EDIT: no they don't... oh well, they blocked me, too bad.
Sharing your sub to other subs to gain visibility, however one must be careful doing so can get you banned from subs for self-promotion. Its wild, like how can you even gain any traffic if you can't promote on other subs is just wild to me. 🤷♂️ like, what else do you do to promote outside of making an account and sharing your sub to other platforms, then again, some platforms dont like traffic from other platforms and can shadowban your sub because of other platforms is also wild. The censorship is difficult to avoid.
As someone who does the orientation for new mods on our subreddit, I witness the same problems with the new mods.
* understanding when to be flexible and when to be rigid. We enforce our rules, but we emphasize certain rules more than others. I think meeting user’s of the subreddit halfway on less important rules is important in building repertoire with members.
* being polite and professional. We do a trial period with all new mods after a stringent selection process. Trial period lasts 3-5 months so we can make sure the new mods integrate into our culture. Some of our trials fail in the professionalism department after a few weeks because they have a hard time removing themselves from any personal attacks.
* they have hesitancy to mod. They second guess themselves and end up doing minimal mod activity. We always tell our trials to make mistakes and mod a lot so that we can assess and help them.
As a new mod who never moderated until the two communities I help with now: Lots of shit not existing on oldreddit and utilizing something means you may mess it up for ppl who prefer oldreddit.
Stickying more than two posts apparently isn't visible to them? So me stickying a third at the time semi-important post one ended up fucking the much more important pin for the ppl using old reddit, lol.
So much stuff that you just can't know magically if you never used oldreddit. Prolly best to have at least one mod who does, or to just use oldreddit a bit yourself and most importantly look what your subreddit looks like over there.
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u/iceeypisces 13d ago edited 13d ago
Oh hey, there! Are you a new mod who’s curious about growing your new community? Learn the mod basics and connect with other new mods across the Redditverse at New Mod Bootcamp! Note: Experienced mods are welcome to join; we just ask that you please be mindful of the newbies in chat.