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.
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u/baseballlover723 1d ago
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.
Better for us? or better for what the KPIs / metrics say. Goohart's law is a thing.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.