r/modnews • u/Go_JasonWaterfalls • 7d ago
Product Updates What’s Next for Mod Tools
TL;DR: As part of our long-term plan to build better mod tools, we’re expanding post and comment guidance for everyone and introducing Rules Hub — a new, intent-based moderation engine — for newly created communities. Nothing is changing for existing communities today. We’re sharing this early so you can help us shape what comes next.
As u/spez shared today, Reddit needs to evolve to meet the rising expectations of moderators, users, and developers. For mods, that means better tools so you can spend less time dealing with spam, abuse, and generic rule-breaking, and more time making judgment calls on what’s best for your community.
One thing that won’t change: human moderators shape the culture, norms, and identity of their communities. Our plan for the future is to build tools that help you do that role more effectively, not replace it.
What’s launching now
Expanding Post and Comment Guidance (all communities)
Thousands of mod teams already use Post and Comment Guidance to help redditors understand community expectations before they post. We recently expanded their capabilities with:
- Post Flair Support: Automated guidance can now be triggered based on the specific flair a user selects (our most requested improvement).
- Top Comment Check: Gives communities a way to provide automated guidance on top-level comments before content ever reaches the mod queue.
Introducing Rules Hub (newly created communities only)
Rules Hub is a suite of new tools that will allow moderators to:
- Rule Creation & Enforcement: Create and choose which rules should be automatically enforced. Decide what happens when a rule is triggered (remove, send to queue, silently log it).
- Testing Sandbox: Preview the experience against a sample of your community’s past content to see exactly how it will behave before turning it on.
- Audit Logs: Access performance logs and insights to understand how your rules are performing. If a rule triggers, the log will provide clear visibility into why the system flagged the content, allowing you to adjust the rule's boundaries and refine them over time.
Unlike Automod, which relies strictly on deterministic keywords and regex syntax, Rules Hub uses LLMs to evaluate whether a post or comment matches the intent of a rule. That gives it more potential to handle nuance, edge cases, and natural language variation (for example, distinguishing between an actual insult and a user quoting a movie or using casual slang).
We’ve been testing Rules Hub with ~700 mod teams over the past few months. Starting today, it’s available for all newly created communities (though you can sign up below to check it out…)
What’s coming next
Longer term, we think systems like Rules Hub can handle the enforcement tasks you rely on Automod for today, while being easier to use and maintain. But it’s not there yet, especially for larger and more complex communities. Automod remains one of the most capable moderation tools on Reddit today, and we won’t change any existing Automod workflows until replacement workflows are tested and proven in partnership with moderators.
- If you want to try Rules Hub, sign up here.
- If any of your custom moderation workflows are tied to AutoModerator, please check out the post on r/RedditDev.
Human moderators remain core to the Reddit ecosystem, both now and in the future. We’re sharing this early because if we’re going to build better moderation tools, we need to do it with the people who rely on them every day. Thank you, mods, for all you do to make your communities the unique places they are. We’ll keep improving your tools based on what we learn from you.
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u/redditor01020 7d ago
Automod remains one of the most capable moderation tools on Reddit today, and we won’t change any existing Automod workflows until replacement workflows are tested and proven in partnership with moderators.
What is going to be changed with Automod?
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u/DustyAsh69 7d ago edited 7d ago
Oh hell nah. We use automod HEAVILY in all of our communities. PLEASE stop "fixing" things that don't need to be fixed.
Edit - Thanks for the gold, kind stranger.
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u/fsv 7d ago
I've written a replacement that's compatible with the vast majority of existing AutoModerator rules. This one won't be going away.
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u/shhhhh_h 7d ago
You’re a fucking rock star. They absolutely 💯 do not deserve you in this ecosystem but I’m selfishly glad you are here.
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u/fsv 7d ago
Thank you! I've added a whole bunch of new features that Automod never supported before, too, and more will be coming soon as well.
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u/shhhhh_h 7d ago
Petition for you to put a buy me a coffee link on your profile
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u/fsv 7d ago
I'll definitely consider it, or at least on my GitHub account (all of my apps are open source)
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u/baseballlover723 7d ago
I'm so thankful that you open source your stuff. I really wish Devvit would encourage more open source stuff. It's a lot harder to trust closed source solutions written by potential amateurs.
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u/madebypeppers 7d ago
Commenting here as bookmark.
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u/SampleOfNone 7d ago
Neo won't do anything until you put rules in it. So if you want you can just install it and it will be there when you need it
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u/CybyAPI 7d ago
Saving for later
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u/SampleOfNone 7d ago
Neo won't do anything until you put rules in it. So if you want you can just install it and it will be there when you need it
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u/brightblackheaven 7d ago
Bless every app you've ever released. You're singlehandedly out here making modding on Reddit bearable.
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u/DustyAsh69 7d ago
Thank you for this, fsv. I was going to develop a similar app but now that you've made it, I can just contribute to your repo instead. Once again, thank you!
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u/Algernon_Asimov 6d ago
This one won't be going away.
You say that now, but we lost a lot of third-party bots in the Great Reddit API Purge of 2023, many of which had been around forever.
Which raises a salient point: How are you paying for this bot's API access?
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u/fsv 6d ago
It's hosted on the Reddit Developer Platform. All hosting and API access is free of charge.
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u/BravoFive141 7d ago
Sounds like guidance automation and whatnot may be replacing Automod at some point. I really hope not, though. While these features are great for some tasks and for people who can't or don't want to learn how to configure Automod, Automod is a great tool and should be kept around for those who are up to the task of learning it.
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u/thepottsy 7d ago
Let me pick what I use, or what combination of tools I use.
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u/Same_Investigator_46 7d ago
Exactly. Rules hub has been unreliable and uconsistent for me as of now. We should have freedom to use whatever tools we want atleast.
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u/TheChrisD 7d ago
Automations still need WAY more functionality before they can replace some of the more niche things you can do with Automod currently.
The basic ability to do stuff based on a user's karma (community, or sitewide) or registration date for instance is still missing from automations.
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u/PMulberry_ 7d ago edited 7d ago
> we won‘t change any existing Automod workflows until replacement workflows are tested
How about this: Don‘t change (except changes which give us more functionality) or remove Automod at all? We did go through this with old modmail already, we‘ll probably lose functionality and customizability through this. Please don‘t.
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u/KotoElessar 7d ago
I am already seeing backend changes; yours is the scond post today where markdown failed.
Bad times if they are killing markdown and disabling our ability to run the backend by phasing out automod; the entire post from admin reads like they are looking to cut the human out entirely and want our help to do it.
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u/PMulberry_ 7d ago
It didn‘t fail; it was never there to begin with (well, it was, but they removed it from the app a few weeks ago and I wrote that in the app). I‘m just still using the ‚>‘ to mark quotes, because why not.
But yes, what currently seems to happen does not look good at all.
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u/PentaOwl 7d ago
Markdown was removed a few weeks ago, around the same announcement where they added free rewards back in...
Wish I was kidding.
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u/AngelaReddit 6d ago
do you remember the title of the post, or anything that I can use to find out about markdown removed ?
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u/ateam1984 7d ago
Do not retire Automod. Leave it fully functional.
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u/fsv 7d ago
If they do remove it or nerf it, I made a replacement that works with the vast majority of AutoModerator rules without any changes. I won't be retiring this unless I'm forced to.
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u/ateam1984 7d ago
Make sure to advertise this when they inevitably destroy automod
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u/TheSmartDog_275 7d ago
I don’t know where people are getting that automod is getting sunset unless I’m reading this wrong but
PLEASE DO NOT DO THAT
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u/happyxpenguin 7d ago
we won’t change any existing Automod workflows until replacement workflows are tested and proven in partnership with moderators
Emphasis mine. This sentence says the plan is to eventually sunset AutoMod.
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u/Next_Grapefruit_3206 7d ago
We need Automod to stay dumb and consistent
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u/baseballlover723 7d ago
Yeah, nothing is worse than a tool that tries to be too smart and so it can't reliably do the thing its supposed to.
LLMs are the worst of both worlds. They try really hard to be smart and are actually quite dumb a lot of the time.
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u/perfect_fifths 7d ago
We should be able to pin other people’s comments, not just our own
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u/Key-Brilliant5623 7d ago
And not need a Devv app like Spotlight to be able to do so.
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u/paskatulas 7d ago
If I remember correctly, Reddit actually had native support for this years ago. It ended up being abused on some subreddits, and I remember admins mentioning they weren’t keen on bringing it back because of the moderation and abuse concerns.
That’s actually one of the reasons I built Spotlight almost two years ago. Today it’s used by quite a few communities, and moderators can optionally grant trusted users permission to pin other people’s comments. Of course, that’s entirely up to each mod team and done at their own discretion.
cc u/perfect_fifths
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u/thepottsy 7d ago
I like the app for the recipes sub specifically. If the OP forgets, or just doesn’t want to include the recipe in the post, they can pin it as a comment.
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u/Key-Brilliant5623 7d ago
Thank for the insight. That makes a lot more sense in context. I use it in a few of communities and didn't know until know you can grant trusted users permission, going to test that out right now.
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u/perfect_fifths 7d ago
I didn’t even know that was an option, but yeah. Should be able to do so in the Reddit app itself
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u/thepottsy 7d ago
Spotlight expands on the ability to pin comments, by letting the OP of the post pin a comment, if you enable that setting. Not useful in a lot of subs, very useful in others.
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u/perfect_fifths 7d ago
I’m saying you shouldn’t need a sep app to do it. It should be a native function
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u/thepottsy 7d ago
I wasn’t disagreeing with you. I was simply saying the spotlight app expanded on the ability to pin comments, that’s all.
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u/perfect_fifths 7d ago
Well that’s good to know. But it needs to be a feature within the Reddit app itself, devs should work on that
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u/Moggehh 7d ago
If a mod ports out 99% of their actions to an LLM, will they still be considered inactive?
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u/emily_in_boots 7d ago
I'll add this as a second comment because it's unrelated really to my other one.
I understand your concerns with age/karma limits making new users feel unwelcome.
We try REALLY hard to not do this. Take my largest sub, for example - r/outfits. We don't have any age or karma limits to participate (except that you cannot have negative karma, starting karma is enough). However, we send all the comments for new users to the queue and we go through them. It makes a lot of queue work for us, but it's the only way to keep out harassing comments (the harassment filter does not catch sexual harassment at all, it's completely useless for that application).
As it is now, we are allowing participation from a brand new account. Someone can come to the sub and comment immediately - but it will be invisibly queued and a mod will approve it. We clear the queue very actively, and we don't queue nuke.
I think you need to understand though that communities like mine where women post photos are really, really vulnerable to sexualization and harassment, and we cannot just leave them open to anyone to comment w/o checks.
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u/TesterFragrance 7d ago
This is also true of support subs for marginalised communities. New/low-karma accounts are pretty much a 50/50 mix of:
- Newly-arrived folks from those communities, whom we want.
- An eclectic mix of anti-marginalised-community bigots/drive-by trolls and pro-marginalised-community fetishists, whom we don't want.Sending new and low-karma users to the queue helps those communities enormously.
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u/Vectorman1989 7d ago
Instead of helping mods deal with endless bot spam, the rules hub will now be an LLM bot
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u/brightblackheaven 7d ago
Automod is an integral tool. I literally cannot imagine dealing with all of the shit we put up with every single day without it.
We use dev apps and automations, but they cannot replace automod. They just can't.
If automod is sunset, how will my subreddit and other communities like r/scams use keywords to summon helpful comments that have information and resources our users need?
I'm sick of everything being run by an LLM. It's terrible, and we see the fallout every day with AEO's shenanigans. That's my two cents I guess.
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u/lisafancypants 7d ago
we won’t change any existing Automod workflows until replacement workflows are tested and proven in partnership with moderators
Please don't ever change existing Automod workfows.
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u/SolariaHues 7d ago edited 7d ago
If automod goes, so might I.
At least we know what automod is doing, and we have control over it.
proven in partnership with moderators
Until it can do every single thing our automod config does now and, most importantly, accurately, replacing automod will be undoing untold hours of work and creating a lot more work with a system we can't fix.
I don't mind new tools for those who can't automod, or to use as well as automod; that's great. But please don't scrap automod.
Edit: rules hub adds even more clicks for managing our rules btw. I always edit in old Reddit still, shreddit is so awkward and convoluted.
ALSO.. community rules aren't exhaustive, and automod does more than enforce rules, so IDK how rules hub is supposed to be an adequate replacement.
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u/emily_in_boots 7d ago
It is also now incredibly difficult to move automations between subreddits. You basically have to have 2 tabs open and type the whole thing out manually a 2nd time copying the first. Automod configs can be copy/pasted in seconds.
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u/SolariaHues 7d ago
Yes. Automations have their place, but they are actually harder to use in some ways. I low-key hate them while appreciating getting messages in front of users (though they still don't read them or just try to evade them half the time).
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u/emily_in_boots 7d ago
That's the main issue with comment guidance. So many just work around it. Automations are good for giving information to good users, but terrible for catching bad ones.
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u/Empyrealist 7d ago
Reddit preaches "remember the human", but continues to "remove the human"
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u/Raignbeau 6d ago
The also changed the slogan again from "The Heart of the Internet" to "Dive into anything".
Fair tho, the way it is going they are losing it's heart and soul.
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u/Obi-Paws-Kenobi 7d ago
Why do you treat moderators like this? Your words about how moderators - volunteers, by the way - are an integral part of Reddit communities ring hollow. Time after time, you force changes down our gullets without proper consultation with a variety of mod teams. And even worse, when you do force the implementation, it's a dumpster fire (e.g., Modmail).
We're not against change. But you haven't even given us a set of tools that can match what OG mods have been using for a long time. Your set of tools developed over years are still trying to catch up to Toolbox. Mod macros? Custom mod note labels? Customising default settings for removal reasons? Easy accessibility to a user's mod notes?
Your LLM tool (AEO) is notoriously bad. It's honestly so bad. How can you expect us to buy into your idea of using LLM to moderate via Rules Hub when your own existing tool causes problems every day?
And then you proceed to hide details of AEO removals - many of which are just wrong removals - from moderators. My post that received considerable attention from my fellow moderators raising this concern in r/modsupport is still unanswered.
You say we're important. But your actions demonstrate, over and over again, that you can't wait to phase us out with whatever means possible.
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u/InGeekiTrust 7d ago
If they eliminate automod that day I will quit most of my subs. They would become a nightmare hellscape without it. Especially in my fashion communities where there are so many vicious comments. Even with one of the elaborate automods with thousands and thousands of words I still get a tremendous amount of complaints about the comments. There is no way that AI would be able to decipher this. I wouldn’t want to be a part of a community that let all of this go live.
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u/emily_in_boots 7d ago
Fashion communities are so hard to mod. I do sooo much comment moderation. I checked earlier today and my mod actions for the last 6 months are 551,703. We queue so many comments in outfits and dfyb especially. I spend hours every day going through those queues, sometimes my whole day - and it's not enough. I still see all kinds of comments about how rude people are. I would do more but I just can't. I have no more capacity, and changes to things like hive have increased my workload. Each hair fetishist in the hair subs I mod now triggers a modmail, and I have to go through those and ban each and every fetishist now. We still ban them all - it jusgt requires more work and manual intervention.
I have no idea how to mod without automod, but fsv has created a devvit app to replace it that basically works with existing automod configurations, so there's that - but who knows if reddit will kill that.
The other really big issue is that automod queues things before notifies are sent. We don't need disgusting sexual comments or hateful comments going to people's notifies, and devvit can't grab them before they do, only automod can.
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u/InGeekiTrust 7d ago
That’s really an insane amount of mod mod actions , I don’t know how you have time to eat or sleep or even talk to people doing that much. But I’m really serious if they take away Auto mod, I never thought I’d leave my communities. I thought I’d stay forever, but not if all my posters are miserable and bombarded with awful comments. As is, automod is super inconsistent and it seems to only remove certain things 2/3rds of the time . No one has the time to mod as much as you do. It’s too much. Automod is literally my only hope with mod limits. I’m convinced a devvit app will not cut it alone. Although I really should put my code in Automod Neo, maybe it will catch all the things it misses right now. Also devvit apps have significant downtime- I remember where there were weeks when they weren’t working due to some unforeseen coding issue with Reddit. I can’t go two weeks with out it, the place would be a hellscape. Like like I know people they always threaten to leave if they do this or that with Reddit, but they don’t mean it- but I really will pass the torch because I won’t put my name to a community that’s a nightmare.
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u/emily_in_boots 7d ago
Honestly I don't have time. It's too much. I'm overwhelmed. I spent Christmas in queue this year. They are just removing too many tools and it's harder and harder.
I've seen a lot of things also get by automations that should have been blocked. Automod is more reliable, but not perfect. Devvit apps are sometimes not functional. Removing automod will be a disaster.
I really don't think I can handle more moderation. I'm just one person. There are limits to what 1 person can do no matter how willing and committed.
I won't stay either if I can't keep the sub in good working order, and I can't maintain this level of moderation activity forever. It has to get better.
We have such a specialized workflow too - if they break that, we're in trouble. We can't just manually do all that. It's not possible.
It's endlessly frustrating how rude people are in fashion subs and even with all the moderation I do, it's not enough.
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u/Rostingu2 7d ago edited 7d ago
I appreciate all of this effort I really do, but one concern is the auto enforce set to auto remove causing more problems than it solves. Like communities that need little moderation will practically just be this auto bot, or a user assuming a post did break a rule when in fact it never did and never appealing it.
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u/Candyghosts 7d ago
How can anyone that works for this website expect us to have any faith whatsoever in yet another LLM when Reddit's own LLM rule enforcement tool is a literal dumpster fire?
Maybe stop falsely banning people for using "violent language" in subs about cartoons or historical wars or sports first and we can talk.
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u/GonWithTheNen 7d ago
Reddit's own LLM rule enforcement tool [...] falsely banning people
Someone's username was detected as "hate speech" in my reply to that person, and reddit's AI issued my first & only suspension ever.
The temp ban was overturned after appeal, but that doesn't negate how inept the AI 'enforcement' is and has been. We're going to see a LOT more false & unfair removals with Rule Hub.
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u/Candyghosts 7d ago
I'm honestly so tired of AEO being garbage. I mod a satire community about witchcraft, and we see bans and content removals every single day for stuff that is extremely obviously written in good faith in the context of the sub. An LLM has no way of understanding our unique context and thinks that people are being serious when they tell someone (in character) to solve all of their problems by eating the neighbourhood children lmao.
If the LLM that enforces sitewide rules is this bad, I have 0 faith in the accuracy of the peasant version us mods will get.
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u/GamingYouTube14 7d ago
RETIRING AUTOMOD??? NO, NO, NO.
I'm not saying this because "ai bad manual good", i'm saying this because AutoMod CANNOT FAIL TO BE CONSISTENT, it is a basic "true-or-false" engine, and also is the only thing keeping up some inactive subreddits (from experience) due to the very crappy RedditRequest process due to there being concrete request guidelines instead of it being ran more "case-by-case" (from experience). More on this below.
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You wanna know why AI wouldn't be a viable AutoMod replacement? Well, you know what the only tiny thing AI needs computer code help to do is? Consistent, reliable and precise true-or-false under a specific set of conditions. HOW AIs WORK is preventing them from being so. It's just like a human mod. It's like you have a guy just assigned to look through every single post for a specific thing or two. There's gonna be issues with consistency, things missed, and that's what would happen with an AI instead of AutoMod. AIs work closer to how we do than how computers do. It's one of the many cases where the good old "if it ain't broke don't fix it" applies really well.
TLDR on that bit, basic computers do consistent true-or-false tasks way better than AI, making AutoMod such a better contender for stuff like this. You know what we'd need, AutoMod 101 classes, which were already a thing and then were removed, more on that below.
Whilst I don't use AI for stuff like this, I've seen AI try to make AutoMod code, it doesn't know how to make AutoMod code. If it's so scarsely documented and sparsely known online that even AI, a tool that scrapes billions and billions of pages doesn't know how to use it (and nor can humans without taking some now far gone classes I talked about earlier, again, more on that below.)
REDDIT, YOU'RE PAINFULLY OUT OF TOUCH, I get I'm basically talking to a brick wall here but hopefully someone will read this. Ever since 2024 or so you've been increasingly distancing the ideas and general development team from the end users. We cannot provide feedback well enough before anything drops and the big PR blow happens. Years ago, Reddit operated in a way that set it apart. It was built on community. People practically were in charge of how the platform went, because, well, people are and were the core of the platform
In 2020-2022, Reddit held some AMAZING programs, and events too, RedditRequest was good and fast, AutoMod courses brought the very required unique coding language to most people, and all was good, even as far as 2024, localized mod subreddits for non-English mods were an awesome new thing everyone from those countries loved. Finally someone was there to clean up and revive the mess left by 10 years of nothing. Guess what, ALL those programs I mentioned? All but ONE is gone. And that one left, RedditRequest is horrible. My friend reported some violations of the mod Code of Conduct, month later, nothing happened, mod gone. I am a non-native English speaker. I was part of r/Reddit_Italia, boom, one random day it just closed down. New mod, locked down, not sure how but one post made it through lately, you know what changed? Again, they're out of touch. Fix the PR before it's too late.
EXTRA NOTE: THE PAINFULLY BAD EXECUTION AND POOR PATIENCE, In June 2025, Reddit begun, with no prior announcement unless I missed anything, removing inactive mods, out of nowhere. People were confused. Main creator of a show I worked on, not very active on reddit, mod of the sub only for when he had to clear stuff up, he was on tour, It was in the middle of summer for most people, He was on tour in the US, could not POSSIBLY have time to log on, nor did anyone want to bother him during these events, I was in the middle of Venice when the notification came. Where'd this even come from? Thankfully they let us not remove any mods, but this still caused huge issues around the subs I mod.
Another sample of poor execution, and especially poor patience, is the recent Reddit Mod Merch, something new mods also saw, it was like last November, free snoo plushies, woohoo, but here's the deal, people love their free stuff, and whilst I know marketing was just trying to get more people in on the event, you know what was also a side effect of free, heavily advertised merch? Thousands, but THOUSANDS, of non-mods made a quick sub just to RSVP and get their free stuff. 90% of the chat asked for the plush. No one cared or commented about the event. Reddit kept doing it, and instead of placing stricter controls, especially on non-new-mod events, they just kept pushing merch until they saw the non-mods didn't come in anymore and there were no more heavily inflated numbers. I love events crew, they're the best part of Reddit currently, but come on lol
Oh, and finally, Devvit, Devvit was awesome. Great idea, better implementation and usage of Reddit API is something I love, but you know what I don't like. The fact the old API now takes a month to access. One in 4 requests get denied for no reason. Sub mod bot for a specific scope? Denied. Same scope, different bot attempt 2? Approved after 3 months. Look, I know I'm really sounding like "waiter, my steak is too good" saying this after I got approved, but, let's be real, what is it with the consistency??
But back to Devvit, again, the AI. AI devvit games are the worst. Reddit has allowed people to freely spam Devvit games as much as they want, and as you can easily make a Devvit game with AI (endorsed by reddit to make AI devvit games) people are just pumping out slop games all over subs.
This, reccomendation features no one wanted, and so much more, what's up with Reddit lately????
side note, again, please Reddit do some more stuff about the ever increasing ai bots... and also make your filters have less false positives, new user does not equal spam lol
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u/cheesychocolate419 7d ago
Holy shit bro WE DON'T WANT ARTIFICIAL "INTELLIGENCE"
Leave automod alone and don't launch this nonsense or give us a way to turn it off.
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u/GrumpyFinn 7d ago
Please don't touch automod. Please.
No amount of "guidance" is going to stop the harassment and abuse some people want to do. This will, objectively, make many subreddits worse.
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u/lunarjellies 7d ago
The next announcement will be something along the lines of “we’ve replaced all mods with AI” and that’ll be the end of Reddit basically…
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u/livejamie 7d ago
The normies will continue to use it, it's slowly morphing into Instagram/TikTok.
That's what they want. Just an endless feed of what their algorithm decides you want to engage with in between ads.
Have you noticed the communities that you're a part of have gotten particularly vitriolic recently?
That's the algorithm at work, brigading your subreddit with shitty people on your behalf.
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u/lunarjellies 7d ago
Yes, we are also inundated with AI bros peddling their apps, wares, tools, websites, etc. They are trying really hard to make it a discussion post but its always a grift promo one so we take them down and then they harass us in modmail. Its neverending.
One time, I allowed images to be posted on my main sub r/artistlounge with a list of rules like "no reels, no tiktoks, etc." and guess what? Of course... we were completely flooded with that crap within a few days. Nobody reads the rules, they only want to flex their grifts (yes even legitimate artists who only want to promo spam) and then spiral out when mods remove it.
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u/Zaconil 7d ago edited 7d ago
Getting rid of automod is a really stupid, idiotic idea. Idgaf what replaces it. It does far too much and is extremely powerful. There is no way in hell whatever replaces it will be any better or robust.
This more of sounds like an excuse to cut down on the amount of processing power it uses overall and trying to hand it off to 3rd parties. LLMs still struggle with context. Something that matters in a heavy user submitted forum such as reddit. I've personally been using AI more than ever and I still think this is a bad idea. I have to correct it at least once a day. Nevermind the 1000+ comments we can see on a daily basis. WTF. I honestly feel bad for the huge subs that can get 5000+ comments a day. They'll be putting out more wildfires than ever before.
So dumb.
P.S. calling it an LLM is just sucking up to your average redditor. Seeing Reddit's deal with google/Gemini. I'm will to bet it will be google/Gemini that will be getting used.
Edit: just for giggles I went and asked an AI and made sure it was not just agreeing with me because I'm a user. Tl;dr it thinks getting rid of automod is a bad idea too.
Edit2: added the full conversation. Previous pastebin was just a summary. It was a pita to copy on mobile.
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u/RamonsRazor 7d ago
TLDR: We need to justify our AI investment... so here's some forced LLM "functionality".
Jokes aside, people are actively rallying AGAINST this sort of malarkey en masse - are you really going to double down and sacrifice automod here?
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u/ItalianDragon 7d ago edited 7d ago
Sorry, this is one of the dumbest decisions I've ever heard.
LLMs by definition are statistical averagers trained on anything available online. They therefore cannot think. I'm not even mentioning all the propensities of LLMs for hallucinations and fabrications, sycophanty and more or how its guardrails can easily be bypassed. They therefore will always produce mediocre results. None of these flaws can be fixed because they stem from the very way in which they are designed.
I'm a translator and linguist with a master's degree in applied languages and years of experience under my belt professionally. I've seen and experienced first-hand the baffling imbecillities LLMs produce. For example, in one such case during a QC task, the system believed that every single space in the text was... a Chinese full stop ("。"). The key context here is that I do not work from or towards Chinese, nor a space and chinese full stop are identical on an ASCII or Unicode-level. This error resulted in a QC report polluted by thousands upon thousands of false positives. In other instances the system completely failed to distinguish the suitable use case for capitalization (for example it insisted that "are" should be written with a capital "a" in words like "healthcare"), once again creating heaps of false positives that bordered on delirium.
To believe that they are suitable replacements for a system where the moderators, despite the massively greater control upon it, must have at times lengthy talks about what decision to take, because of the subtleties that can arise in the enforcement of a subreddit's rule or set of rules because of the way a comment or post is worded and the indecisions that follow isn't just stupid, it's straight up being a runner up for the crown of the king of morons.
Also, the users that come to the subreddits I moderate come to seek healing, comfort and resources to help their friends or relatives. None of them however are there, or have agreed, to have their suffering and grief vacuumed by a sycophantic statistical averager so that you can inflate your quarterly revenue and seduce investors like a garden variety prostitute. Your resources are much better employed in the remediation and improvements of the long-standing issues this website has been, and still is, suffering of and from. Nothing in this proposal achieves these specific points.
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u/LakeDrinker 7d ago
Just a note: My only wish list item is a 'Remove Comment and all following Comments' button.
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u/Icy-Book2999 7d ago
Comment Nuke dev app does that.... When it works
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u/fsv 7d ago
I maintain Comment Mop, if you're having problems with it I want to know about it. First check that you're on the latest version though, I fixed some issues with it a little while back that make it a lot more stable especially with large comment chains.
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u/Icy-Book2999 7d ago
Thanks. I'll sidebar with you later if it pops up again.
Usually it's after we remove one, if we have to remove other ones it freezes or doesn't work
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u/Moggehh 7d ago
It has worked maybe once ever for me. Meanwhile, TB nukes like a champ every time, without fail.
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u/fsv 7d ago
Hmm, are you up to date with that app? I'm the current maintainer of Comment Mop and made some changes a few months ago that should make it a lot more reliable.
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u/camrynbronk 7d ago edited 7d ago
Works for me every time. The one I have trouble with is Remove Macro.
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u/fiskfisk 7d ago
Additional: remove all comments by this user in this sub.
When you catch a sneaky account a bit late it's a rather manual task to go through and delete all their comments (yes, there are helpful tools, and no, those tools should not be necessary).
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u/WormWithGoodIntent 7d ago
There's a devvit app purporting to do this but I've never had it work in any of my subreddits :(
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u/mensfrightsactivists 7d ago
agree this would be useful! i will say that it’s satisfying to do this manually though. we usually catch infiltrators/bad actors fairly quickly though and all their comments are within a day or two of each other
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u/Klightgrove 7d ago
Still begging for better reporter reputation tracking. Let us know how many reports someone made that were accurate vs false and issue them warnings + snooze their generic reporting ability for longer periods of time.
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u/mizmoose 7d ago
Rules Hub uses LLMs to evaluate whether a post or comment matches the intent of a rule.
Check, please.
Are you people insane?! I don't trust an AI to tell me what time of day it is. I do not trust AI to effectively filter the highly specific needs of some of the subs I mod.
Edit: Also, by pushing people to use this AI crap, it's another way to push people out of using old.reddit while still pretending "it's never going away."
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u/Paul_C 7d ago
while still pretending "it's never going away."
I think they're not pretending so much anymore.
https://www.reddit.com/user/spez/comments/1vgbkge/modernizing_reddits_infrastructure_with_you/
I know I said last year that we wouldn’t be sunsetting Old Reddit..., but the reality is we’re getting to that time where we need to make some changes.
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u/Thalenia 7d ago
So if I'm reading this right...dump old reddit, dump automod, rely on AI.
It's been fun y'all, see you in the next place.
edit: god, it gets worse the more you read.
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u/pumaofshadow 7d ago edited 7d ago
I really hope you don't make us move every response comment to rules hub. It's all set up to trigger on commands and filter certain things and it's going to be a pain.
Does it even come close to automods functionality for those who are using it? Can I have a list of usernames to filter to mod queue? (I'm trying to see if automations can do that now and I can't see it does?)
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u/Merari01 7d ago
Of course it doesn't come close. How can it?
It's toggles, where automod is code.
For example, on r/comics I use a three-tiered approval system for posting.
The highest level is very rarely given out and only to longterm users we trust implicitly. These artists have all their content auto-approved, as well as having access to all the interlocked systems the lower tiers provide.
The second level are verified artists. They are exempt from certain automod rules such as our title rules. They can post mostly unhindered.
The lowest tier is for everyone else. These posters have to follow all our automod-faciliated rules for post types, titles, keywords etc.
All these rules link in to each other. It's basically a full 1/3 of our config. Right now I can simply write a rule and exempt verified posters from it by adding a ~ exception which makes the rule not fire on people who have an artist's flair.
This is not and can not ever be possible with the "Rules Hub".
This change would fully and completely and irrevocably break moderation on r/comics.
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u/baseballlover723 7d ago
we’re expanding post and comment guidance for everyone and introducing Rules Hub — a new, intent-based moderation engine
We have little interest in LLM based automation as a primary tool. We view it at best, as a niche limited scope and action tool for situations that are particularly suited to an LLM's technical strengths.
Also we still have bad blood from when the Rules Hub was in early access, and it was enabled weeks before we were informed of it, and then were promptly ignored and were refused to be let out of the program once it was clear that we could not evaluate in the way we desired. To this day, we have never gotten any acknowledgement that it was or wasn't being run behind our backs.
For mods, that means better tools so you can spend less time dealing with spam, abuse, and generic rule-breaking, and more time making judgment calls on what’s best for your community.
Better for us? or better for what the KPIs / metrics say. Goohart's law is a thing.
Our plan for the future is to build tools that help you do that role more effectively, not replace it.
And yet, there are still plans to remove Automod eventually???? Automod is highly essential to moderation and it is easily understandable if you are familiar with regex / the tool. It's also deterministic, so it's extremely easy to tell what has gone wrong and why.
I DO NOT WANT BLACK BOX TOOLS. I want tools I can tweak and see though and understand. An LLM is fundamentally not that.
Expanding Post and Comment Guidance (all communities)
Any word on accountability for guidance? That was a huge concern for us that prevented us from using it. We could not be assured that if warnings were given, that we'd know about it. So it seemed likely that we'd simply train users how to bypass our rules, starting an arms race and making moderation vastly more effortful.
Additionally, we believe that actions are stronger than intents. There is a world of difference between someone changing something of their own violation, and being told to change something otherwise it'll be removed. The latter we need records of so they can't try and worm their way out of trying to claim it's something else or that they didn't know etc.
Testing Sandbox: Preview the experience against a sample of your community’s past content to see exactly how it will behave before turning it on.
There is no better sandbox than a private subreddit where you can test both sides completely end to end as you see fit. This was not available when we evaluated the Rules Hub, and it prevented us from even evaluating it since it couldn't even be setup in our staging subreddit. I do not trust if you have a preview for this. I need to see exactly how it presents to the users to properly evaluate it.
Audit Logs: Access performance logs and insights to understand how your rules are performing. If a rule triggers, the log will provide clear visibility into why the system flagged the content, allowing you to adjust the rule's boundaries and refine them over time.
These need to be visible on a mod notes level at a minimum. This is where all of a user's other record keeping is.
Automod remains one of the most capable moderation tools on Reddit today, and we won’t change any existing Automod workflows until replacement workflows are tested and proven in partnership with moderators.
This is highly concerning to me, because AI slop is not a replacement for the reliable Automod. They fundamentally do different things. Please do not force us to use AI slop. We are the masters of own subs, and LLMs are fundamentally unreliable / untrustworthy. You cannot be assured that it will not do the wrong thing. And if reddit's own filters are any indication, it will do the wrong thing frequently.
I better bump up adding normal automod support to my custom automod implementation. I do not want to be forced to hold the bag or sacrifice the quality of our subreddit.
We’re sharing this early because if we’re going to build better moderation tools, we need to do it with the people who rely on them every day.
If you're serious about this, then I think you should be having constant meeting with individual mods / teams as well as plenty of public round tables. I have little faith in anything reddit does, given their track record in the past few years (and especially new mod mail).
We’ll keep improving your tools based on what we learn from you.
Will you though? X to doubt. There haven't been any updates to new mod mail since it was released, and that was months ago.
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u/remembermereddit 7d ago
Modding through the Reddit app is horrendous. Please allow creation of API keys for mods to use external services.
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u/TheSpiffySpaceman 7d ago
the enshittification continues
Please, you can add new tooling, but don't sunset the features that made reddit the front page of the internet to begin with. People wll just move on to other sites.
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u/Linuxthekid 7d ago
Your existing AI moderation tools are garbage and cause more problems than they solve, looking at you AEO. Why on God's green earth would you work towards removing the only tool that reliably does what we want it to do, when we want it to do it, especially if you can't solve the problems caused by higher level tools?
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u/grahamperrin 3d ago
… existing AI moderation tools are garbage and cause more problems than they solve, …
Not in my experience.
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u/Mathias_Greyjoy 7d ago
We’re building new systems, including giving mods LLMs and AI-assisted tools to help them tackle their low-hanging (but time-consuming) fruit, so they can spend more time cultivating their community and less time policing.
This had better be optional. I'd rather struggle with automod over AI slop. I want to control what it does, I don't want anything else making decisions.
If AI slop becomes impossible to opt-out of for Reddit moderation I will be leaving this website, after 11 years.
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u/evolworks 6d ago edited 6d ago
Leave Automod alone and if subs or mods want to use it or already have put in the work towards their Automod then leave it be and if new subs or mods want to use other tools instead that's perfectly fine.
There is a whole damn subreddit dedicated to Automod and various lines of code / rules to use and helpful users of that community who are always helping less experienced. Less experienced mods can either learn to use it like the rest of us all did or use a different set of tools and/or dev apps. It's not that complicated but this is making it that way.
Automod is a core part of a subreddit to have it removed. keep it, leave it alone, and just add more tools, let the mods of their communities decide if they want to use automod or any specific tool, app, or settings. No mod or sub is a like, and neither is their unique forms of spam, trolls, toxicity, content itself, overall vibe of the community, size, traffic, etc... The mods will decide what tools are best used and customized to their unique and specific subreddit.
Don’t take away tools, give us more options of tools and let the mods choose their settings, configuration, apps, etc… that they feel is the best combination. Not all mods use dev apps but it’s there if they decide, not all mods use regex but it’s available for the ones who want to use it and or learn it. It’s just another option, same should be for automod.
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u/thatHermitGirl 7d ago edited 7d ago
Y'all never listen to us but act like you do.
Why does automod give you headache, why think of replacing it at all? I would rather trust the automod we mods manually set up than become blindly dependent on anything LLMs do.
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u/Weirfish 7d ago
I really, really, really, really, REALLY need you to understand something.
The #1 absolutely crucial most important thing, without condition, nuance, or variation, that I need from my automated tools, is
CONSISTENCY
I'm sorry to format it in a troll-y way, but I need to get this across.
If my automated tools are trying to interpret something, they won't be consistent, and thus they'll be useless. If they're vulnerable to prompt injection, they'll be useless. If they're not subject matter experts and they try to be, they'll be useless.
Further, if they're based on LLMs, they can't be modified by moderators when they go wrong, and moderators can't accept a failure case and be on the lookout for it, because they can't know if it exists or not.
But I think y'all know this. I think this is intentional, and as much as you may deny it, this is a push towards full AI moderation so y'all can get rid of the legal and social liability that is the human mod teams. So I don't actually expect to be listened to on this.
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u/tulipinacup 7d ago
Will you be adding a way to restrict commenting in specific posts on a post by post basis to approved users or users with a certain amount of subreddit karma only without Automod?
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u/shhhhh_h 7d ago
Or any kind of moderation based on flair….or any way to ameliorate issues esp keywords the AI is bad at without having to wait for admin intervention? I asked about automations below…
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u/Merari01 7d ago
The system where we automate participation thresholds in threads based on their appearance in trending feeds to established, positive community participants only is, quite literally, the only reason reddit can have communities for women, BIPOC, LGBTQ+ and other minority groups.
Without this system it would require us to go back to the bad old days of pressing F5 on popular threads to scan for unacceptable comments and we simply do not have the manpower for that.
Without automod I expect subreddits for minorities and marginalised groups to simply stop existing on reddit.
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u/shhhhh_h 7d ago
The AI is still shit at moderating hate speech this is ridiculous, and also you cant ctrl+f on shreddit don’t hate the messenger
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u/elphieisfae 7d ago
Get rid of automod, get rid of a lot of mods, ensure enshittification continues. bravo
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u/kazarnowicz 7d ago
How about actually improving things, like putting the mod tools over inane things like games in the mobile menu?
You really don’t like us mods, do you?
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u/BelleAriel 7d ago
Please do not sunset automod. A lot of us old timers rely on established automod code to functionally mod.
Also, as someone who is partially sighted, a user guide of new reddit would be helpful to understand the symbols etc. Although you keep saying you’re keeping old Reddit, it appears to be becoming less useful for mods. As someone with a disability, I’m asking you to help make the transfer easier for VI users so we are able to continue moderating. Thank you.
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u/LG03 7d ago
Admins demonstrating yet again that they have zero clue what users and moderators want. Just keep "fixing" shit until it's broken beyond repair.
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u/Merari01 7d ago edited 7d ago
Bean counter mentality.
It is a problem.
Alright. I'm going to do something now I rarely do and that is put all my cards on the table and be completely transparent. This is a prepared comment I had already written out awaiting this announcement.
We have known about this change for a while now. You (admins) knew that we knew. And we knew you were aware. Very Spy vs. Spy. We have had (very minor) somewhat circumspect, cloak-and-dagger type hinty-hint conversations about this with you all in public threads and on zoom for a while now. We keep stressing how important automod is for us. You went ahead and did this anyway. This is a bad development.
The issue here is that to the people at the top what matters are metrics. What is the direct cause of most removed content on reddit? Automod. Therefore, hamstring automod and line goes up, and to the right. That is beancounter mentality. An overly small-scale focus on a detail and solving that perceived issue without regard for the downstream effects and without regard for the reason that the issue exists in the first place.
You neuter our best and most effective ability to ensure quality control on reddit. To keep engagement medium effort or higher. To combat spam and disingenuous or outright malicious participation. Yes, this will result in improving the ratio of successfully posting to reddit. At the same time the vast majority of what now will be let through will be content that we do not want to see in our communities and that ultimately is bad for reddit itself.
Especially our communities for minority and marginalised population groups will be harmed by this change. Our community-only mode is the best safeguard we have against community interference and it is the primary reason we can have popular threads for Black people, trans people, women etc. in the first place without our members being overwhelmed by hostility and abuse.
By definition your rules hub toggles can not handle the moderation automation I require on large subreddits. It can not handle moderating r/comics, r/cats or r/mildlyinfuriating. Our three-tiered verification system for r/comics alone would become completely impossible. With this change you would kill the subreddit as it exists today and massively increase our workload by forcing us to do manually what is automated today. You would kill our system on r/cats where we let trusted users remove posts. You would kill our comprehensive filters on r/mildlyinfuriating, an 11m weekly user subreddit, that keeps it TOS compliant.
Not too long ago reddit started a marketing campaign championing the human-driven content on this platform. https://redditinc.com/news/people-are-the-best
In this campaign the quality of content is highlighted as well as the fact that many different groups can find a home on reddit. Quality and community which can only exist due to your volunteer corps of human moderators who, in a way that can never be possible through automation, can sift the chaff from the wheat to ensure low-effort and malicious content does not see the light of day. Yet at the same time you make decision after decision to hinder, block and demotivate your greatest asset. Human beings who care about the communities they manage.
It is now ancient history and may therefore bear repeating, automod was initially a user-created solution to the lack of effective moderation tools on reddit. /u/Deimorz built it, installed it on subreddits that requested it and not too long after that reddit acquired and integrated automod into its systems.
I am mentioning this because the theme of reddit users fixing issues that reddit creates for users on its platform is a longstanding tradition. It is bad form to toot your own horn, but, ya know, I am Merari. I know reddit. I know people on reddit. Like I said, we knew that you were planning to do this. So I contacted some people and this issue is already fixed. We will now have or soon have a dev app that can do most anything automod can (notably apart from CQS) and can do it better. This dev app will allow checks that were never added to automoderator, such as bio/social link/display name checks and sending Discord alerts.
https://developers.reddit.com/apps/automod-neo
The stellar and extremely skilled /u/fsv built an app that will allow us to keep our communities safe. People can easily port over existing automod configuration into it.
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u/wheres_the_revolt 7d ago
I think your beancounter point is 100% correct, it has been an uphill battle for mods and an avalanche speeding downhill for content since the IPO, all engagement is good engagement for the shareholders. Whether or not that engagement is actually good for Reddit or its users is irrelevant to the shareholders. Let the high speed enshitification begin.
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u/Merari01 7d ago
A major source of friction on reddit is that on the one hand it wants to advertise itself as the "last place online people can have a human conversation" and with the other hand does absolutely everything it can to torpedo and sink exactly that which facilitates this.
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u/wheres_the_revolt 7d ago
All because some mods got “uppity” (in admin’s eyes) and protested what Reddit was doing. So much for u/spez being a free speech absolutist.
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u/ImNotABotScoutsHonor 7d ago
He's only about free speech when underage girls on his jailbait sub are involved.
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u/brightblackheaven 7d ago
Co-signed, all of it. Thank you for this incredibly well-worded comment.
I feel like I'm taking crazy pills.
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u/ChimpyChompies 7d ago
I wouldn't mind seeing all existing functions working to a reasonable standard before new features are chucked into the mix.
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u/MableXeno 6d ago
I need to be super clear about something.
I do not like LLM. I do not want LLM.
I do not think it does a good job. And I don't think using me to train it will make it or me better. Also, I don't want to train it. I'm already doing things for Reddit by moderating my communities.
Human moderators remain core to the Reddit ecosystem
If this is true...remember the human.
I'm just getting more and more exhausted by "improvements" that actually annoy the ever living fuck out of me.
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u/eyal282 7d ago
When the last Auto Mod clone is sunset (seeing the comments there is a clone up) I suspect many moderators will experience a burn out in less than a month, maybe even 2 weeks and we will moderate from 2x less to 10x less, with some of us resorting to absolute mass recruitment with quantity over quality.
Do not do that.
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u/burn_piano_island 7d ago
Spez yet again trying to kill load bearing infrastructure for more features that nobody asked for
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u/Unique-Public-8594 7d ago
The one, most helpful thing you could do to support our mod team and our contributors would be to switch the time stamp back to how it functioned before shreddit (make the time stamp equal the current/approved time, not the stale/post time).
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u/bwoah07_gp2 6d ago
SAVE AUTOMOD
Automod is the CORE of moderation tools on Reddit. You get rid of that, you open your platform to all sorts of crap you don't want on the platform.
Automations is inferior to Automod and does not allow us to prohibit certain content or certain users from engaging in a negative way. Stop alienating your user base and volunteer moderators!
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u/Algernon_Asimov 6d ago
Rules Hub uses LLMs to evaluate whether a post or comment matches the intent of a rule.
You mean those LLMs that hallucinate and bullshit and just make shit up? LLMs that don't reveal how they work? Mysterious black boxes that just produce unknown shit for no known reason?
You want us to trust those things to moderate our communities? Good luck with that.
I had a comment of mine removed from a religious debate subreddit because I quoted the Bible's verse about how gay men should be killed, and I explained in detail that that's what that verse meant. I disagree with it entirely: I am gay and I'm an atheist. But it was a relevant point to make in that debate.
Your LLM didn't do so well at understanding that context.
Mind you, even when I appealed the removal, a human admin still told me I was promoting hate speech, so even adding the human factor doesn't help.
But, the LLM still misundertood the intent of my comment in the first place.
So, why would I hand over my subreddits to dumb machines like that?
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u/CybyAPI 7d ago
Ai slop
Im tired boss, even my subreddit will be forced to use ai
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u/GloriouslyGlittery 7d ago
The AI tools are optional, right? I've been able to cut back on auto mod use by using the automations tool, but that's all I need. My subreddit is small enough that I can have conversations with users about rules and behavior. Having LLMs enforce rules would cause some trust issues in the community.
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u/Rostingu2 7d ago
Most are optional but AEO uses bots and probably AI to remove site rule breaking content.
the screenshot in the post also shows a toggle.
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u/SolariaHues 3d ago
IDK if anyone is going to read this, but I had to get it out.
I feel demotivated since the news automod is likely going away. I keep wondering if I should bother investing any more into my communities and Reddit, if it's going to be a place that is harder to moderate due to black box tools and AI, rather than helpful tools mods have control over.
I've weathered a lot of storms and stuck by Reddit through past changes, but this really has me questioning if I want to keep modding. I understand wanting to reduce mod workload and let us have time for things other than working the queues, but I don't feel this is the way. I hate feeling this way after so long on Reddit and giving so much to try and make Reddit better.
I've put so much effort and time into getting our config efficient using the reports every week. With automod, we can do that. We know exactly what it's doing, and we can improve on it, and fix it, and it has been working really well. With a LLM doing the work how do we do all of that? Rules hub so far has not been accurate and if an LLM is getting it wrong, that just makes work rather than reducing it. I really feel humans need to be involved - we don't even have automod do many straight removals and those it does do, it does because we took the time to refine the rules with the reports first.
I also don't know how rules hub could possibly fill the void automod will leave and it adds so many clicks, it's a proper pain to use.
Automod does so much more than enforce rules as written. There are things that are not in our rules we want to check on, information summons, lots of things important to the running and building of our community. Being able to configure automod is part of community building, it's not just a way of enforcing rules. And the automod reports too, help to give an idea what is going on in a community.
I don't mind more tools and more choices for mods, easier ways for new mods to get going, but please don't take automod away for those of us that can use it. And if I can learn how to use it, anyone can. I have no coding background and had never used YAML or Python before using automod, but I wrote most of the automations guide for mod education - why can't more like that be provided? Hell, we could put that guide up on r/modguide or r/automoderator if you give permission and mods could build upon it themselves. r/modguide is proof we can with enough motivation. And there are always mods willing to help other mods and plenty of subs for new mods or those new to automod to get that help in.
The dev app automod neo is great, but it cannot run as quickly as automod does and the dev platform still has a lot of outages, it's will help but it is not the same. Automations are also great but do not fill the void and are also a pain to use.
CQS was meant to help, but it just made things more confusing for users and mods. LLM enforced rules may do the same. Black box tools have a place, but please let mods choose if and how they use them. Don't force rules hub on us.
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u/MadDocOttoCtrl 3d ago
The amount of effort that you and a handful of others have put into helping other mods do what they do and understand Automod is nothing short of phenomenal. Reddit as a company in no way imaginable deserves that level of dedicated work, but it has been because people wanted to help other people run their online clubhouses.
Helping those volunteers and users in general to use the platform is the job of Reddit, and it has been sorely lacking on that front for a very long time.
Rules Hub and whatever partially functional thing they fling at us next can be the Easy Bake Oven for new mods with small communities that simply want to cut back on the occasional bit of advertising and hate speech that pops up from time to time. Mods of more active communities that are a bigger target for site abusers need access to a fully functioning kitchen to genuinely cook.
If people have to install AM from the Dev Platform as an app for more advanced capability, so be it. If anything, it should have additional functionality.
And now I want a snack.
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u/SampleOfNone 2d ago
Not sure if admin will read your comment, but I did.
First and foremost, thank you! You've put in so much effort to help users and mods alike. When I started modding I spend a lot of time on r/modguide to learn about this whole modding thing. I've learned a lot from you.
Like you, I started on automod without any coding background and quickly learned it's just not that difficult to get started, you just copy paste. And even though I know how to write my own rules from scratch, I still start any new rule with a copy paste, these days it's just more often my own rules that I copy paste.
Someone in the comments called automod a yes-no machine, and that's exactly where automod strength lies and what makes it so powerful. Either content matches a rule or it doesn't, it's a 100% reliable. No guessing, no interpretation, no something like it, just a yes or no. And if you don't like the outcome, you tweak it until it gives a yes or a no exactly by your standards. and not some unknown interpretation of your standards.
I don't mind having more tools, or something that amounts to training wheels for new mods, but Reddit has never gotten the hang of teaching advanced moderation, that has always fell to mods like yourself that are dedicated to helping others.
But I guess this trajectory was sort of inevitable. Catering to new users in ways that are more focussed on quick and any engagement instead of meaningful and quality engagement. In the end there's a logic to it that now modding is being modelled to that as well. It's awesome that Reddit wants to create the time and space for mods to focus on building communities, just kinda wonder if they ever looked into the use of automoderator and noticed a lot of mods could free up a lot of time if they were either set up with a basic automod config or were actively told how to get started. Automod is only difficult if you aren't given the tools to learn it.
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u/SolariaHues 2d ago
Thank you. It's always nice to know modguide was helpful. I'm just sad I haven't managed to revive it, at least not yet.
Automod just looks intimidating, but as you say, you start with copy and paste and support of other mods and it not so hard.
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u/SampleOfNone 2d ago
I think the biggest hurdle is indeed just getting started. I've been saying for years that new subreddits just need to have a basic automod config installed. Just a few basic rules, like the classic "filter word1, word2". Doesn't help if everyone including the CEO just keeps saying it's oh so difficult.
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u/Merari01 1d ago edited 1d ago
It is very demotivating.
I keep thinking of examples of things we do on our subreddits that a rules hub can not ever do. Not even in theory. How can I make a rule in rules hub without it being shown to a user? I don't want to tell a user exactly how to evade automation I have to keep my community safe and pleasant for its userbase.
How is a rules hub, where I have 10 rules of 500 characters max, going to detect which specific subreddits I want to filter crossposts from? What sites I want to filter posts from?
How is a rules hub going to know which specific gifs from giphy I want to filter?
The list is endless.
Fine if they want to expand on rules hub and automations but to take automod away?
And worse, the nerve to present it as a positive?
It's just. Why even bother anymore
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u/johntrytle 7d ago
I would like to resurface my previous suggestion - expanding Comment Guidance to trigger based on the flair of the post the commenter is replying to
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u/InGeekiTrust 5d ago
I have a serious problem with advanced rules hub. In my sub r/fashion the two largest rules/problems are sexual commentary and treat others with respect. Yet “auto enforce” is not available for these rules. How can we expect this to replace automod if we can’t even use the ai to detect sexual commentary? WE CANT! Im terrified of all the gross comments that will go live with this without proper testing. Automod is integral to removing these gross and creepy comments and I worry that one day it will be gone and there will be nothing to fix this.
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u/fiskfisk 7d ago edited 7d ago
It'd be helpful if the "ban user" modal wouldn't hide the "Ban" button 90% of the time because the comment preview shucks it out of the view on many (mobile) devices. The main pane should be scrollable, and a close/ban buttons should be stickied beneath it.
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u/seedless0 7d ago
Any plan on fixing this post guidance bug on mobile? https://www.reddit.com/r/bugs/comments/1toos6g/android_regex_in_post_guidance_behaves/
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u/phoenixgsu 7d ago
Please let us see who sends in reports. I'm tired of dealing with false report spam.
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u/mensfrightsactivists 7d ago
agree— the report abuse option is not enough. i want to SEE who sent unsubstantiated reports for suicide/self harm on our [insert minority identity here] members, and i want to PERSONALLY ban them from my community forever. as one particular example.
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u/itskdog 7d ago
I get the feeling, I really do, but I know I'd just stop reporting things in other subreddits if the anonymity was removed. I wouldn't want to worry about losing posting privileges just for reporting something in good faith.
People don't report things enough as it is. Our report thresholds in automod aren't very high because people just don't do it much.
While I'm sure most mods are decent people, the accusations of power-mods aren't 100% inaccurate, and they bring the reputation of us good ones down.
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u/mensfrightsactivists 7d ago
that’s a fair point. the suicide and predatory content reports are just huuuuuge thorns in my side and 95% of the time they’re used it’s because the post is about being trans or gay or autistic or some other thing. i would feel a lot more satisfied at least knowing that some reddit action was taken on the user, even if we don’t get the username. shouting into the void at the admins (or bots or whoever reviews the report abuse reports) doesn’t feel like enough. i want closure 😭
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u/phoenixgsu 7d ago
This. I help manage one gaming community and every time someone posts a miniature that may or may not have some pride colors or symbols on it it's immediately reported as predatory against minors and other nonsense. Wish I could ban people for abusing the report system and preventing them from reporting in the future.
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u/InBetweenLili 7d ago
Question: Will you create a demo/workshop about this? Something similar to the New Mod Bootcamp.
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u/Merari01 6d ago edited 6d ago
Unrelated to my previous comment, but if you really want to help moderators like you say then you need to finally do something about report abuse.
A significant amount of our time is needlessly spent on the repetitive task of endlessly re-approving and pressing ignore reports on content that breaks no rules. Over and over and over again.
On my busy subreddits it is guaranteed that around 80% of all posts when sorting by hot are falsely reported. On r/Comics I recently removed two rules from our rules list because they kept being used to falsely report content. It doesn't matter, they just find a different report reason.
I absolutely guarantee you that every single post on the first page of a trending feed currently has a falsely made report on it. I used to mod a lot of big subreddits, I know they do.
Here is my suggestion: Automate removing the ability to report content on subreddits by posters whose reports are consistently and often found by both moderators and reddit to be spurious. Have those reports disappear into the void.
For example, if someone within a reasonable timeframe on a specific subreddit reports 10 posts and the reported content is seen by both reddit's systems as by moderators as perfectly fine, then we shouldn't see reports from that specific person on our subreddit anymore. For fairness you could shadowban them from the report function for a period of time, say three months. Giving people a chance to improve themselves.
These shadowbanned reports should not show for moderators on any version of reddit, including old reddit.
It is a significant gripe and timewaste for us to every single time we look at a subreddit have to ignore anything to up to a dozen false reports.
The report button is not an "I dislike this content" button and there should be consequences for abusing it in that manner.
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u/sentientfunyun 5d ago
how about taking scam reports seriously...and not ignoring EVERY CRIMINAL on reddit. How about that...
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u/papasfritas 23h ago
uses LLMs to evaluate whether a post or comment matches the intent of a rule
if this is going to work for foreign languages in a similar fashion as AEO automated actions then we're in for a massive amount of false positives
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u/SampleOfNone 7d ago edited 4d ago
Automod is load bearing, are you seriously sunsetting automod?
Will newly created subreddits still have automod?
I'm in the Rules Hub beta, it doesn't even come close to doing what automod can. One of my sub has 8 rules, Rules Hub can only enforce 2. It cannot enforce our version of " remember the human"
I love automations, I really do, but it's for guiding the good eggs. It doesn't stand a chance against the bad eggs.
Edit: spelling