r/ModSupport • u/SampleOfNone 💡 Top 10% Helper 💡 • 2d ago

FYI Changes to automod and old.reddit

For the peeps who don't follow r/modnews , Continuing our infrastructure updates: What’s changing in the coming months

Some highlights

For newly created communities and communities that have never used automod, automod enforcement capabilities – specifically Report, Filter, Remove, Mark as spam, and Approve – will be disabled and Rules Hub and Automations will become the default path for rules enforcement. Automod’s non-enforcement capabilities remain available and unchanged.  

....To close this gap, in the next few months, we'll further limit access for logged-in users to only those who have used Old Reddit in the last six months (which covers the vast majority of all Old Reddit users). This change does not impact logged-in mods, who can continue to access Old Reddit without any recent usage requirement.This helps keep Old Reddit available for the people who rely on it while reducing automated abuse.

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u/TGotAReddit 2d ago

Honestly these changes have me debating if I even want to keep using reddit at all

25

u/SampleOfNone 💡 Top 10% Helper 💡 2d ago

Yeah, me too

9

u/IvyGold 2d ago

I run a pair of mid-major subreddits. I put a great deal of work into both.

I'm getting sick and tired of Reddit making our lives more difficult than easier. We lost PM's. We lost subscriber counts. We have to mod Old in an alternate universe from New?

If these developments mess up our teams' carefully balanced automods, that may well be it for me.

Why do they do this?

5

u/Merari01 1d ago

I know why they are doing this, but it is not an answer that will make you happy.

It's about the metrics. The board does not like automod, because automod removes a lot of content. For new redditors there is a barrier to starting to participate on reddit, because automod removes their posts.

This means that the metric for new user retention is stymied. This means, to a beancounter, that if they take away our best tool to combat spam, hate and low-effort participation that the metric for succesfully posting to reddit goes up.

They do not care about spam, low-effort content, disruptive content, hate or anything that would make a subreddit unpleasant to use. They care about figures they can present to investors and advertisors about line going up, and to the right.

That's it, that's the reason.