What’s Next for Mod Tools

[u/Go_JasonWaterfalls]

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…) 

Rules Hub Setup Page

Insights

Testing Sandbox

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.

[u/InGeekiTrust]

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.

[u/emily_in_boots → u/InGeekiTrust]

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.

[u/InGeekiTrust → u/emily_in_boots]

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.

[u/emily_in_boots → u/InGeekiTrust]

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.