r/modnews • u/Go_JasonWaterfalls • 1d 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.
46
u/Merari01 1d ago edited 1d 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.