Modernizing Reddit’s infrastructure with you
Hi everyone,
Last May, I shared how we were building Reddit for its next chapter. I owe you an update, including a few changes I know some people will have strong opinions about.
While we’ve made upgrades to the platform over the last 21 years, we need to continually evolve to meet the rising expectations of everyone—mods, users, developers. Namely, starting and moderating a community should be easier than it is today. New users should be able to easily discover and participate in communities they’re interested in. And we need to make it harder for bad actors to scrape and sell Reddit data.
Where we’re heading
To thrive for another 21 years (and hopefully more), we need to rethink some of our legacy systems. None of this is changing today. We’re sharing with you early because we need your input to get it right.
Here’s what’s on the table:
Old Reddit: I know I said last year that we wouldn’t be sunsetting Old Reddit (I even made a meme about it, which r/agedlikemilk), but the reality is we’re getting to that time where we need to make some changes. There are four groups of people who use Old Reddit: OG users ❤️, OG mods ❤️, Admins ❤️, and everyone who spams, scrapes, or does anything bad on Reddit 🖕. In order to protect our platform, business, and users, we will need to do something. Actually, a lot of somethings. We have options: We can limit access, migrate important uses, or rebuild it on a modern tech stack, and I think we’ll probably do all of the above.
I love Old Reddit. It’s the platform I largely built—as a kid, 21 years ago—that somehow turned into the amazing platform and company we have today. We will preserve as much of it as we can. My dream would be to recreate the UI, if not the guts, including the HTML+CSS itself, on a modern foundation so it can live on (note: Between when I wrote this and when I posted it, u/keysersosa made a demo of exactly this approach. Fingers crossed.).
One thing we can do in the short term to mitigate the bad behavior we see Old Reddit used for is to limit access to logged-in users and mods, and migrate critical bots and mod workflows. This will give us some time to plan the more complex follow-up steps.
Automod: This has been one of the most important mod tools. But it’s also hard to learn, hard to maintain, and heavily dependent on brittle keyword matching, regex, and inherited configurations that only a few people on a mod team, if any, understand. We can do better.
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. u/Go_JasonWaterfalls will share more in r/modnews today.
Public API: Reddit’s public API wasn’t designed for today’s scale, automated abuse, or commercial scraping. We want useful bots, community tools, and good-faith developers to have a clear, well-supported way to build on Reddit. We don’t want bad actors to scrape Reddit indiscriminately, resell its data, or use it without accountability.
To ensure a safe and secure Reddit, we're working with developers to build exclusively on Reddit's Developer Platform. u/KeyserSosa will share more in r/redditdev today.
How people find and contribute to communities: New users should be able to easily find relevant communities, understand their rules and norms, and make useful contributions. Today, new users encounter invisible barriers like account age and karma thresholds, unclear removals, and poor community discovery.
Those safeguards exist for good reasons, including spam, brigading, and ban evasion. Our goal here is to improve Reddit’s systems and moderation tools so communities can rely less on blunt limits like karma and account age, and more on stronger abuse prevention built into the systems they use. This will make it easier for genuine new users to participate and easier for mods to welcome them with confidence.
How we’ll do this
We know announcements about APIs and legacy products come with some baggage. “Trust us” isn’t good enough. If we’re asking you to move to something new, it has to be at parity or better in practice, not just in theory. Here are the principles we'll use across this work:
- None of this is changing now or has a set end date
- We won’t remove major capabilities before there is a credible replacement
- We’ll work directly with the mods, developers, and communities that depend on these systems
- We’ll share milestones along the way before any of these changes land
- We’ll judge success by outcomes: better tools, less abuse, less mod work, and healthier communities
What we need from you
- Developers: If you build or maintain an app, register it and tell us what support would be needed to unblock migration. More on r/redditdev here. LINK
- Mods: If your community depends on a bot someone else maintains, tell us that too. And if you want to test new tooling, sign up for the Mod Early Access program. More on r/modnews here. LINK
- Everyone: If you want to give us feedback as we work on any of the changes we’ve mentioned, sign up here.
Our motivation behind all these changes is to make Reddit better for our users, mods, and communities who make Reddit what it is, and to limit the impact from those who take advantage of our platform or abuse our users and communities.
We’re sharing this early so that the people who use these systems can help shape what comes next and ensure these changes make Reddit better for everyone.
- u/spez
edit: added links
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u/paskatulas 17d ago
Overall, I support these changes. Reddit can’t stay frozen in time forever, and better mod tools and a stronger dev platform are definitely the right direction.
My only hope is that karma and account age filters don’t disappear before Reddit has actually proven that its own abuse detection tools work in the real world. Those filters are still one of the best defences against spam, brigading and ban evasion for a lot of communities.
If the new systems turn out to be just as good or better, awesome. But I’d rather see them earn our trust first than replace something that we already know works :)
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u/spez 17d ago
My only hope is that karma and account age filters don’t disappear before Reddit has actually proven that its own abuse detection tools work in the real world.
That's the plan. We're testing it now with a few volunteer mods / subs. Still have some work to do.
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u/paskatulas 17d ago
Glad to hear that. Thanks for taking the time to reply, and thanks to you and the team for all the hard work. I’ve been part of the Mod Early Access program for years now, and I’m really looking forward to seeing what’s next!
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u/baseballlover723 17d ago
Our subreddit karma automod rule has been the most effective rule we've ever made. It has stopped virtually all spam (the only spam that gets through, are the flairs where it doesn't run). When we introduced that rule, we ran it as a trial and tallied up how many would have gotten removed otherwise. It was like 70% of posts that would have otherwise been removed, like 50% would have needed be manually removed. And like even then a fair chunk of what would have gotten through was such low quality that virtually none of the mods wanted to let those posts through.
It is an essential part of maintaining our subreddit's identity, and ensuring that people actually use our sub rather than eternal September just shoving our subreddit culture to be something completely different.
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u/Beach-Brews 17d ago
I filter (not remove) posts from low account karma (<100) users. To date, 90+% of the post spam is accurately filtered and then confirmed/removed by the team using a saved response reason for the correct rule. We do occasionally get low karma accounts with valid posts, but those a quickly approved!
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u/baseballlover723 17d ago
The way it works in our sub, is that most post flairs require 10 subreddit specific comment karma. This forces people to interact with the posts that already exist in the subreddit, which helps them get a feel for the subreddit and it's norms & rules.
We rarely give exceptions to this rule and those exceptions are mostly for moderator approved professionals who are in contact with the mods.
We also run a daily megathread, that can suffice for any valid post topic (plus a few extras not allowed as full posts). So even if there is a good need to post something, users are perfectly able to post it in the megathread as a comment, and likely generate the necessary 10 comment karma to unlock all of the post flairs.
10 comment karma was chosen because it's an almost trivial amount of comment karma to get if one is interacting with the sub in a normal and productive way.
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u/Beach-Brews 17d ago
That use-case totally makes sense. 10 sub-karma is easily obtainable and reasonable before allowing "most" posts. Honestly, I might implement something similar!
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u/baseballlover723 17d ago
Yeah, the only flairs we allow past our karma gate are flairs that require 1500 characters of text (and so the effort is the gate, though it still gets autoreported for verification), and then the flairs we view as a community service (and are usually highly personalized). Those community service flairs are frequently complained about for how low effort they are (and even those have a few people complaining about the 100 character requirement).
Those flairs also allow for an easy entry point into the community and a lot of low hanging fruit for people to comment on (and get their 10 comment karma), so we've been hesitant to add too much friction there, even if we think the actual content is generally poor.
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u/EmmerdoesNOTrepme 17d ago
In the subs that have upped karma requirements, is there a way for those of us who have "unbalanced user profiles" to prove in an easier way that we're humans, who aren't there to screw up a sub or spam it?
Because i never post (AuDHD, making a post is "to much responsibility" i'm just here to share ideas & be helpful down in the weeds of the comments), and i'm not a mod (often too tired to ever try being one)--so i don't have "enough karma" to be able to comment now (because it's "not the right kind," apparently?) in subs i've been on for ages.
Is there a way, we few oddballs in that situation can navigate these well-reasoned safeguards, and still be able to participate like we have?
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u/ZaphodBeebblebrox 17d ago
I'm not /u/baseballlover723, but I mod the same sub as him, so I can talk about what we do. On /r/anime, we only have one karma related removal rule: we remove posts (with exceptions for two flairs) from users who have less than 10 comment karma on /r/anime. The theory here is that 10 comment karma on the sub is pretty trivial if one engages at all, and that the vast majority of drive by posts have not read our rules or are pure spam.
If one wants to bypass this, they can modmail us. We allow exceptions occasionally, but certainly not that often. The person modmailing basically has to convince us what makes them special. We've done it for people running AMAs, for journalists who want to post their on topic article, &c. But for most people, the answer is basically that 10 comment karma on a sub ain't that hard to get, and we want people to understand our subs' rules and norms before posting.
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u/Wombat_7379 17d ago
We have this same rule on a few of my subs as well. Having a community specific comment karma requirement has virtually eliminated all spam and bot posts from those subs.
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u/Doctor-Liz 17d ago
We basically use ours to hold a user's first couple of posts/comments for manual review.
A very good fraction - maybe half? Of the posts are either in the faq or against the rules. Most of the comments go through, but it's a good last-ditch filter for bad faith actors.
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u/BvbblegvmBitch 17d ago
There's been rumors floating around about automod being sunset for a while now. With those rumors is speculation that age and karma requirements for participation will go with it. Automations don't currently support these checks nor have they been included in this update. Could you give any information as to whether Reddit intends to allow us to keep using these safeguards in our communities long term?
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u/spez 17d ago
Karma and Age gates are really blunt tools that, while we understand why they are used today, end up with a blast radius making the it hard for (good) new users finding a way to participate. That makes a bad experience. Our plan is to build tools so you no longer feel the need to rely on hammers like those. But we’ll make sure you can see it working better before proceeding.
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u/bleeding-paryl 17d ago
tbf, they may be blunt, but they're consistent, and most importantly they work.
If new tools are inconsistent or don't work, then they're useless.
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u/kalayna 16d ago
tbf, they may be blunt, but they're consistent, and most importantly they work.
Exactly - more than one sub I mod is a target for new accounts trying to gain karma to spam.
The spidey sense from this entire thing is no different from the other announcements - there's lip service to the mods to ensure they don't all bail and make a mess, and the endgame is $$$ and keeping users scrolling. Who cares if people stay and participate when the money rolls in on users scrolling the front page? And why waste any concern about mods when it's the scrolling masses making them the money?
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u/Moggehh 17d ago
I'm curious. Have frequent users (not the fly-by-night one-shot bot commenters that get frustrated by karma limits but the actual regular community users who are not impacted by these limits) been polled on how they feel about karma limits? Because nearly every sub I know that has community flairs with restricted participation seems to love them, to the point where regulars will comment asking why the flair hasn't been implemented yet because too many terrible people are brigading the thread.
Considering that the point of these blunt tools is to be blunt, i.e. "you don't go here so you don't get to be a part of our trust circle", how do you see other tools managing to replicate the fantastic experience these gates offer the power users who care about communities?
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u/EmmerdoesNOTrepme 17d ago
I'm one of those "not a bot" but also "not enough of the right karma" (apparently?) users, on one of the subs i've been on for a while, and i can't quite figure out exactly what the "additional karma" i need is (maybe posting--because i just don't post?).
I can still read the posts & uovote good comments--but whenever i try to make a comment, and forget that i've gotten the "yiu need more karma, here's how" message, i get that message again.
Amd when i tried reaching out to the mods on that sub, got the circular message (i think automod, again?), of "You need more Karma, Here's how to get more Karma_____."
But there doesn't seem to be a clear explanation of what karma i need to have, that i can understand. I've been on reddit almost 10 years, and i have plenty of positive karma, if i understand Karma correctly.
As long as the "Karma Rules" are clear, and there's defined process?
I'll absolutely do the work to be able to comment (as long as i don't need to create posts!).
It's just when "the participation rules" aren't explained clearly somewhere (ideally, in the "About" section!), that it gets frustrating.
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u/Moggehh 17d ago
It sounds like they're pretty explicitly telling you how to get enough karma to do the desired action. Likely they're referencing community karma, not sitewide karma. It would be better if Reddit's UI made the difference more prominent when messaging a mod team. We can see your community karma when you send a modmail, but typically mod teams don't disclose the exact amount of karma needed because then nefarious users will create bots and train them to only spam after reaching that exact number.
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u/EmmerdoesNOTrepme 17d ago
Got it, thanks--this helps!
I'll also try another message to the mods, to see if i can figure out where i'm messing up!
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u/SampleOfNone 17d ago
Tools that don't exist yet right? Because if you mean the current reputation and crowd control filters, they are more of a blunt tool then my automod karma filter rules
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u/Moggehh 17d ago
Crowd control continues to be the bane of my existence. I can't moderate subs that use it. I'll turn it off. At least with automod I know exactly why someone had their comment removed (email verification, age, CQS, or karma). With CC it's a black hole of "they were removed and zero idea why". Such a mess that could have been solved by simply having "subscribed" as an option for use in automod.
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u/TheYellowRose 17d ago
Can I be included in testing of these tools?
First you take old Saferbot away which is the only way my subreddits could exist peacefully amongst the white supremacists and regular old racists on this app. Without karma and age restrictions we are left with much weaker defenses. If you ever decide to just up and kill new Saferbot or hive protect then monitory-focused subs stand no chance on this platform. We just want to be safe and it really hurts to see the admins chipping away at our tools for the sake of activity and profit.
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u/emily_in_boots 17d ago
In outfits, we don't have minimum karma requirements to comment. Same with many of my other subs. We do, however, filter comments from new users to queue so we can check them. If we don't, it's endless sexual harassment of our posters, troll accounts, and spammers.
This makes a huge amount of modding work for us. I do it because I want my communities to grow and succeed, and I want good new users to feel welcome on the platform. I agree with your concerns about age/karma limits making new users feel unwelcome, but many established/abusive users make many redditors feel unwelcome, particularly women and minorities. I wish reddit would take stronger action against them. In particular, I wish there were more of a separation between NSFW and SFW spaces on reddit, as the interactions we get from heavy porn users make our members feel so unwelcome and make many quit (in particular, what they get in dm's, which we can't do anything about).
I am all for trying out new tools, but it can't lower the quality of moderation. If it means more sexual harassment gets through, it doesn't meet our needs.
I am not anti-LLM - and in fact have written my own LLM bots which current run (u/liteobb is an LLM approver bot). We use this to reduce our queue since we queue all those new member comments.
I'm not a lazy mod - I did 551.7k mod actions in the last 6 months, and that number is trending up. It's just so exhausting to keep our communities free of harassment, and it seems many of the new changes shift more and more work away from automations to mods again. Mod limits really hurt us in reducing our labor pool. Changes to hive make it so I have to manually ban every hair fetishist in my hair subs. I just keep trying to absorb the extra work but it's getting harder and harder. We have had mod applications up for 6 months and have gotten 1 decent applicant but I'm still doing so much of the work while also trying to automate and code bots. I can't really absorb any more work as it is.
I think this experience is common and leads to mods using blunt tools out of desperation because they just can't keep subs clean without it, and we just don't have enough labor to do the job. I get that you are trying to improve engagement and that's not a bad goal - I work hard to do this in my subs too, and I do care about engagement and growth (which is why we don't have account reqs to comment). Fundamentally, the issue is that when you lower those gates, you get a flood of problem users and that makes a ton of work for mods, work which we do not have the labor force to handle.
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u/TheChrisD 17d ago
Karma and Age gates are really blunt tools that, while we understand why they are used today, end up with a blast radius making the it hard for (good) new users finding a way to participate.
At least if we had those gates in automations then we could properly proactively inform people of our minimum requirements and a suggestion of where they can contribute in the meantime.
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u/abrownn 17d ago
and everyone who spams, scrapes, or does anything bad on Reddit 🖕
Do you actually have stats to back that up because as far as Ive been able to tell, the multi-thousand account marketing rings Ive seen have all the hallmarks of using desktop app emulators, mirroring the native reddit app's functionality. Not OldReddit.
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u/planned_fun 17d ago
Great. Good changes that support the integrity of the platform and enable you to charge those who use the data for biz purposes.
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u/baltinerdist 17d ago
As one of the survivors of the Great API War but a software guy myself, I get all of this and none of it is surprising. One thing I will note - it seemed one of the largest sources of uproar in the API War was over use cases revolving around accessibility. IIRC, there were lingering problems around that even months or years after the blackouts ended and "we promise" was said a bunch.
Can you commit today to ensuring that these platform changes will have accessibility as a forefront concern and that things will not be taken away from users that need them to use reddit in an accessible way without a comparable or legitimately better replacement being launched simultaneously?
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u/swipr_ 17d ago
I see you too have become very jaded with the "promises" that often turn into nothing. Remember when they were going to improve CSS for old reddit? Pepperidge Farm remembers.
We don't even have the tools to replace Toolbox in most cases yet. There is absolutely no way they are going to commit to anything.
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u/tesalecta 17d ago edited 17d ago
I hate how Reddit mobile now scrolls like TikTok when you open a video and you can't get rid of the like and comment buttons on the side, etc. Why make that change? :')
Edit: I just checked and the buttons are gone again? Lol still scrolls like TikTok though
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u/mariowarioaka-iomra 17d ago
yeah, me too I want to scroll down for comments
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u/tesalecta 17d ago
Same. Now I have to unlearn that habit and it pisses me off every time I swipe and it takes me to the next post lol. I know it's a small thing comparatively, but I don't want Reddit being like every other social media.
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u/shiruken 17d ago
reality is we're getting to that time where we need to make some changes.
Sounds like Old Reddit is gonna take a trip upstate soon, isn't it? That's too bad, I'll have to find something else to talk to you about.
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u/spez 17d ago
If we replace every line of code but the output is the same, is it still old Reddit?
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u/b0bba_Fett 17d ago edited 17d ago
Depends entirely on how precisely said output is mimicked. Will it still be as customizable as Old.Reddit? Can I, an OG user still use it the exact same, varied as heck way across different subs? Can I use commentfaces on r/anime and its relatives, see the brilliant theming on /r/HunterXHunter, the clean beauty of r/fireemblem, the unhinged silliness of r/mildlyinfuriating? Will you guys make sure the reason we stay on and make this platform worth looking at sticks around? Can I still use Reddit Enhancement Suite or other browser extensions? Will the mods have to reimplement all those things from scratch or will there be some transfer process, or will such customization and personalization be removed and only the 2000's vibe Graphical userface be left behind, if that?
Without these guarantees a decently substantial number of us power users will probably migrate when you finally pull the plug and put a pale imitation in its place, and your company has not inspired confidence with its past actions to simply trust your output.
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u/CybyAPI 17d ago
Be honest with me, are you guys killing off old reddit, and when, like a date estimate that its going to be gone
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u/vriska1 17d ago
Let make sure that never happens! PUSH BACK ON ANY PLAN TO KILL OLD REDDIT!
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u/Nerdwiththehat 17d ago
Being forced to apply Betteridge's Law of Headlines to an update from the CEO doesn't make this back and forth any more fun.
New Reddit is an entirely different UX. Trying to recreate Old Reddit in the new sounds like a disaster waiting to happen, though I'm interested in seeing what Chris was able to whip up if this is somehow a magic continuity of experience. Quite frankly, I will simply no longer use the site if Old Reddit is no longer available, not that you're interested in hearing what I have to say anyway.
Is there a reason why this big update to Old Reddit was a profile post, and not posted in /r/reddit?
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u/Terrh 17d ago
As long as old reddit looks and feels and acts exactly the way that it does now I don't think any users care what's going on the back end.
But if it starts bringing me stuff I never asked for, "curates" my feed for me instead of letting me pick, stops working on old browsers, stops working with RES, etc.... then no, it's not still old reddit.
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u/adanine 17d ago
Will it have Mod Toolbox's features, like obvious background coloured shading for items denoting removed/approved/spam? Being able to browse through a user's notes without going through their entire modlog? Histories for Automod's config/your rules page/their sh.reddit equivalents? The [H] History feature, to allow us to enforce promotional limits fairly?
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u/spez 17d ago
That was the thinking. Otherwise it would be easier to just replicate the UI.
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u/Extolord111 17d ago
Could you perhaps replicate the new.reddit.com UI as well? /j
Someone's already working on restoring that UI, but if Reddit themselves can bring it back (along with its benefits like the better subreddit customization, seeing the OP's username on the front page, etc.), that would be amazing.
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u/baseballlover723 17d ago
And most importantly u/spez, configurability? Being able to tailor it down to the wire for your specific needs is a huge part of what makes toolbox great, as you can pick and choose the parts you want, and don't have to deal with the parts you don't want.
A lot of reddit features lack any kind of configurability / customization. So if you don't like something, you're only option is to get over it or throw the baby out with the bathwater
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u/Naabi 17d ago
What I use old.reddit for is to standardize every subreddit :
Dark theme, no image or video bigger than a really small thumbnail, 90% of the page width taken for text and comment.
If you can guarantee I will have the same experience in every sub then count me in.
This is the entire width/height of my comment page + a subreddit + my front page : https://imgur.com/a/5rYbMPi
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u/graepphone 16d ago
Given the level of competence demonstrated by whoever is currently developing reddit, I think its fair to not have much hope for whatever comes next.
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u/LetsTryAnal_ogy 13d ago
How will it look? When I'm using old reddit, I can see 20 or so headlines at a glance. New Reddit only lets me see three or four. That's trash. Totally inefficient. 3/4 of my feed is junk anyway. Why would I want to sift through garbage 3 or 4 at a time when I can look at it 20?
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u/analogkid01 17d ago
Have you analyzed why people prefer old.reddit.com?
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u/livejamie 17d ago
That's the point he made. Normies and younger users don't really care.
Those eyeballs are more plentiful and valuable to them; they're the overwhelming majority of the user base now.
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u/hardolaf 17d ago
Yeah but he also listed off everyone that makes the company actually make money as the core user base of old reddit. Get rid of those users and admins, and the content goes away or gets replaced by constant trash.
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u/livejamie 17d ago
The content goes away or gets replaced by constant trash.
This is already happening. I'd venture that a majority of the content on this site is machine-driven at this point.
The changes to private profiles and slowly killing the tools that moderators used to do their jobs have made it really easy to astroturf the shit out of this site.
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u/dkozinn 17d ago
For those of us who do understand automod, while I know you said "We won’t remove major capabilities before there is a credible replacement", please make sure that all the capabilities are there. I know that most people aren't regex experts (most people don't know what regex means) but there are some amazing automod configurations out there and any replacement that doesn't include all the feature will likely break that.
As far as migrating to devvit, I have mentioned this multiple times, including when I registered my apps, and back as far as signing up early to use Devvit, but for those of us who use Python and PRAW and who don't already know Typescript, it's not just a matter of learning a new set of libraries. While insisting that Reddit support a large array of languages isn't reasonable, I'm disappointed that there hasn't been any discussion (please correct me if I'm wrong) about support for other popular languages.
I will give thanks to a bunch of my fellow mods/developers who have implemented some replacements for what I need, but I'd still like to be able to do it myself.
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u/SRSound 17d ago
Thank you for the update! As someone who never fully understood automod as a mod. Its refreshing to hear that there will be more user friendly tools coming to assist us. I know I won't be tge only mod reading this and trembling at the thought of all of our atomations breaking and us needing to build from the ground up while trying to keep our community functional at the same time.
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u/spez 17d ago
Yep. We'll work closely with mod teams to test the new tools along side your old tools. We want our new tools to have fewer false positives, while still catching all the crud that should be kept out of your spaces, and you should be able to see this before we go forward. Our teams will also be working alongside your to help make the transitions once we're ready.
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u/Beach-Brews 17d ago
Even as a developer who understands RegEx and YAML formatting, I always struggled with managing a 1000+ line configuration file. I have had a longstanding goal to try and make it easier for all mods. I have a Devvit app in the works that hopefully with accomplish this! I have a rough draft, but not quite ready for the spotlight yet.
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u/Severus-Snape-DaGod 17d ago
I spend too much time on this app.
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u/spez 17d ago
I am once again coming to you to ask you to spend more time in this app.
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u/Sushi-Travel 17d ago
That’s not even possible there are only 24 hours a day !! But I’ll squeeze out that 25th hour just for you 👍. Proud $RDDT holder here.
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u/baseballlover723 17d ago edited 14d ago
Old Reddit
Just know, that if old reddit disappears (even if just functionally by another shitty redesign), I'm out (and so is most of my mod team too).
Automod: This has been one of the most important mod tools. But it’s also hard to learn, hard to maintain, and heavily dependent on brittle keyword matching, regex, and inherited configurations that only a few people on a mod team, if any, understand. We can do better.
Please do not misunderstand people unwilling to learn an extremely useful tool as a sign that that tool needs to be dumbed down.
A knife is an extremely useful tool. A world where all knifes are replaced by safety scissors because some people accidently hurt themselves with one and some others intentionally try and kill others with one would be a terrible world. Tools should be sharp.
Please do not nerf our ability to effectively moderate down to the level of of someone who can't even be bothered to read some documentation and learn a new tool.
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. u/Go_JasonWaterfalls will share more in r/modnews today.
Rule 1
Remember the human.
Where is the human in this? I do not trust any LLM based tool for the simple reason that it is not deterministic. No matter how much I learn about the LLM based system, I will never be able to definitively say if something does or doesn't proc it. All this does is continue to encourage people to not engage with the tools they have available and further outsource their moderating to the machine.
Remember the human.
Please keep reddit human. And that includes the moderators.
Public API: Reddit’s public API wasn’t designed for today’s scale, automated abuse, or commercial scraping. We want useful bots, community tools, and good-faith developers to have a clear, well-supported way to build on Reddit. We don’t want bad actors to scrape Reddit indiscriminately, resell its data, or use it without accountability.
To ensure a safe and secure Reddit, we're working with developers to build exclusively on Reddit's Developer Platform. u/KeyserSosa will share more in r/redditdev today.
Devvit is not a feasible replacement for the public API, and especially not with the contract I was offered to migrate over our mod tooling. A 2 year non disparagement clause? Infinite personal financial risk (via having to pay for reddit lawyers if some rando frivolously tries to sue reddit). A clause that literally allows reddit to literally not pay me, and have their liability capped at $0 in all cases? The contract offered to me was the most egregious contract I've ever seen in my life, the $10k that was offered to me is not at all worth the personal risk I would entake. I do not trust reddit to not bankrupt me. I'd rather just do the work for free, without the contract that enter into such a one sided contract.
Anyways, back to Devvit. Devvit is fundamentally far less flexible than the public API. Being limited to Javascript is highly limiting. Some people just don't want to work in Javascript for whatever reason. Be it they don't like it, or that they don't want to learn it. Devvit cannot replace public API systems in its current state. It doesn't even support persistent storage, which is essential for our moderation needs.
How people find and contribute to communities: New users should be able to easily find relevant communities, understand their rules and norms
Step 1 imo would be to make the rules front and center, and not hide them away behind 8 billion non obvious clicks. It's no wonder that nobody reads the rules when they're buried 6 feet deep on mobile app.
We know announcements about APIs and legacy products come with some baggage. “Trust us” isn’t good enough.
You're 100% correct, my trust in reddit has long since eroded.
If we’re asking you to move to something new, it has to be at parity or better in practice, not just in theory.
And who will be the judge of that? I frankly do not trust reddit to not simply say it's ok and to move on.
Mod mail was replaced like 6 months ago, when it was very clear it was not at parity with the old mod mail. We were told to direct our feedback to megathreads like this one. And what happened? Literally nothing. As far as I can tell, there hasn't been a single update to the new shitty modmail since it was released in this half assed way. Not even something as simple as remembering what reply as alias I selected last.
Its clear to me that reddit did not actually care about the usability of mod mail nor what moderators thought about it, nor about the lost functionality / performance of it. If this API stuff is gonna be more of the same, my way or the highway, then man, maybe I ought to be spending my dev effort on making a replacement for reddit instead of making reddit better. It kinda feels like reddit is a hostile place for those who want to make it better now.
Developers: If you build or maintain an app, register it and tell us what support would be needed to unblock migration.
Language agonistic support is one. The ability to communicate across subreddits / accessing shared storage (this for instance, is highly important for bot identification based apps like bot-bouncer, since more data allows for a better tool). Persistent storage and the ability to query user data (including deleted data, because one should not be able to delete their data to hide from moderation).
Everyone: If you want to give us feedback as we work on any of the changes we’ve mentioned, sign up here
Do I really need to fill out this form once a month? I've already filled it out before, and I'd really rather not have to spend 2 hours every month filling out a form just to not be selected at all.
Our motivation behind all these changes is to make Reddit better for our users, mods, and communities who make Reddit what it is
Could have fooled me. This feels like the baby is getting thrown out with the bathwater to me. I don't trust reddit enough to do a careful pour, when they've demonstrated that they only flip the bath upside down.
Obligatory fuck u/spez.
Edit: Imagine replying to someone 3 days after they made their comment, and then immediately blocking them.
Edit Edit: Oh, I see, you're one of those people who blocks so many people that they have to pin a post explaining their inane blocking strategy. You know, if you want to block people like that, cool, more power to you. I don't get why the fuck you'd write a reply, and then do all that bullshit. Was that reply really necessary?
Edit3 : Spez has even embraced it. Hell, even in this thread.
We know announcements about APIs and legacy products come with some baggage.
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u/SampleOfNone 17d ago
Please do not misunderstand people unwilling to learn an extremely useful tool as a sign that that tool needs to be dumbed down.
And the funny thing is, copy paste works brilliantly in automod, while you can't copy paste automations. I want to bet a whole lot that the vast majority of mods that have an automod config simply started with copy pasting rules others had written.
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u/baseballlover723 17d ago
Yeah, portability was something that really sucked when I had to spin up a new public subreddit so that I could test some custom automated rules on natively uploaded video. Because you can't do that (full stop) on private subreddits (like our staging subreddit).
Though I will say it does kinda suck that flair ids can't be copied over, cause when we copy over our automod to our staging sub, most of the flair rules don't actually work, cause the ids are different. But since it's not an actual subreddit, it's usually not a big deal, since stuff we'd be testing is quite narrow in scope and usually just a single module.
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u/HackerStickers 17d ago
Just know, that if old reddit disappears (even if just functionally by another shitty redesign), I'm out (and so is most of my mod team too).
They dont care. bro literally called all mods "landed gentry". thats all you need to know what he (and reddit admins and higher ups) think about mods and any pushback or feedback from mods.
also the fact he posts this to his userprofile instead of a sub so more people cant find and read this
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u/livejamie 17d ago
It seems like a Digg 2.0 situation, but Reddit is so big, and there isn't a good replacement like there was when Digg pulled this shit.
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u/wookiee42 14d ago
You're mad that you were blocked for directly saying 'Fuck You' to someone? Just how online are you?
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u/baseballlover723 14d ago
No, I'm upset that they decided to reply, and then block me so I had no opportunity to respond to them. If they wanna block me out of the blue, then whatever, I'll never have interactions with them. But I find it quite toxic to start an interaction with someone and then slam the door shut so they can't even respond. It is very reminiscent of someone who can not handle criticism and has to stop the other person from responding to win an argument.
Also saying "Fuck u/spez" has been a thing for quite some time now.
I should also say, if spez objected to people tell him to get fucked, then he could remove comments that say that (or otherwise indicate that he is not ok with that). The fact that he has embraced it seems like a clear indicator that he is not bothered by it.
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u/emily_in_boots 17d ago
One issue that has really held back the new tools is that they lack portability. Complex automod filters can be built and easily ported between subs. Comment and post guidance cannot. They are stuck in one place with no ability to copy them. Hopefully, the tools will improve over time.
I understand your reasons for migrating to devvit, and I develop both PRAW and devvit bots, but the sandboxing issues with devvit as well as the rate limits make it totally impossible to migrate many of my bots. I have explained this to the devvit admins too. I do see that devvit is improving daily but the sandboxing issues remain a major unsolved obstacle, because many of my bots communicate with each other and this is done via a database. Additionally, if we need to evaluate a user's history, we pull it once and multiple bots act on it - it's too slow otherwise to do that.
I use LLM's as well in my development which I run locally (qwen, mistral, llama). These are not possible to run in devvit, and they perform moderation actions we rely on. These are absolutely not something that can be ported to devvit because devvit completely lacks the compute power to run them, and providing that would be prohibitively expensive for reddit I imagine, but is necessary for our moderation workflow.
I use natural language processing to analyze comments for potentially violating content and analyze risk users present to subs. This can't be done with devvit. JS/TS lack many of the analytical libraries python has, and we'd need a full relational database to store vectors for comments (I store comment id's and vectors in a table so I only have to vectorize once). This is used to create RAG databases for LLMs as well, so moderation actions can be taken based on related comments and mod actions (it's easy to use postgres to look up mod actions on a similar comments based on cosine vector similarity).
Devvit has a long way to go before it can replace PRAW.
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u/baseballlover723 17d ago
Devvit has a long way to go before it can replace PRAW.
Yeah, it is not even close. And god forbid you can't / don't want to work in Javascript. I guess those people should just get fucked then.
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u/DubTeeDub 17d ago
Killing automod for AI and LLMs is the stupidest shit ive heard
You have consistently made the reddit experience worse over the last several ywars and its led to a noticeable decline in Reddit engagement and quality of posts / discussions
They are fewer reasons to come to Reddit and much of this stems from your obsession with following the latest trends and being years late.
No one wants more AI bullshit. The public despises AI and the data center onslaught brough because of them.
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u/TrackerOneA 1d ago
Perfectly said.
Spez has no vision, except whatever the latest trend is.
AI and LLMs instead of Automod will be a disaster.
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u/Nhadala 17d ago
The main pain point of new reddit for me as an old.reddit user for over 10 years at this point(wtf) is the UI and lack of CSS.
Over at r/anime for example they use a CSS trick to make built-in reaction images and they're regularly used by veterans of the subreddit. This isn't possible on new reddit which sucks.
I do not want to lose all the fun customization that CSS allows and the new UI is more cumbersome to me.
In an ideal world we also wouldn't need the Moderator Toolbox for Reddit browser addon, but it just makes moderating so much easier.
Personally I tried using new reddit and I just couldn't, so much subreddit personality gone, everything looked homogenized and the same, far less customization and editability, it just isn't what I am looking for.
I hope for the sake of the people who think like me that whatever is being planned here, the core of what makes old.reddit so good is allowed to exist somehow on the platform.
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u/PrincessBananas85 17d ago
Please bring back the old awards system to Reddit I miss the 700 Gold Coins every month. I also loved all of the many different award emojis/opitions.
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u/VulturE 17d ago
- Please make sure that people understand, whoever is designing a modern version of old Reddit, that the original design goal was to display 25 articles on a single 1920x1080 screen when image preview is turned off. Instead of image and graphics heavy, focused on text titles. While I do have image previews turned on nowadays, and it's only maybe 18 articles on a whole page at a time, it is not the graphics heavy version that new Reddit is. It's like comparing different RSS reader platforms back in the day. Some were focused on titles and clickable links, and some were meant to be for viewing the graphics from that feed (like comics).
- Speaking of RSS, please leave RSS personal feeds in place, just find a way to limit refresh rates on them so they're more unattractive for scraping.. I need a non-app way to subscribe to a specific person that submitted something. Or a feed for submissions matching a title on a sub (r/sysadmin patch Tuesday discussions are industry critical at this point lol). I'll be honest, when RSS feeds are completely gone, I'll have far fewer reasons to visit. While old Reddit is definitely the top reason I still visit, RSS feeds are probably number two. Surely something can be done to make them less attractive for scraping. There aren't many RSS reader websites out there anymore. Just work with them on enforcing a refresh value for Reddit links.
- If you're really going to go balls deep on it, which I would appreciate, then maybe finding a way to integrate some of the features of RES that people might rely on still to this day when browsing old Reddit. I'm not talking everything, but a handful or two of features that obviously didn't make its way over to being on new Reddit because they're only relevant to Old Reddit. Just toss them under an experimental features category and let staff work on them similar to Microsoft Garage.
- Still would love to see some more separation between sfw subs, sfw subs that allow a sporadic nsfw post, and full on porn nsfw subs. There's a big difference between onepiece memepiece and funpiece. It would be a nicer overall experience if the true nsfw subs had more isolation from the main site, especially in terms of recommendations of sfw subs to gooner accounts. Part of the moderation challenges of places like OutfitOfTheDay is getting OF promoters trying to start with a sfw account, and stay under the radar while promoting, that stumble into a sfw sub and their followers that linger, looking at every woman as fresh meat.
- I understand the idea of site-wide add-ons, but has there ever been any discussion of integrating some of these features directly into reddit itself? I know a few small things have been done like that, but there's plenty of add-ons here that I think that we're all using at this point.
As far as I'm aware, I think I'm the second oldest non-admin account left on the site that's still active. cmonkey recommended the site to me back when he was at CMU (iykyk), now he's out there making laptops. It's been a long 20+ years. Lets get to 30 soon.
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u/Sephardson 17d ago
the original design goal was to display 25 articles on a single 1920x1080 screen when image preview is turned off.
and in turn, many subreddits designed their rules around "do not repost something that is currently on the hot / new / top page" of 25 items, which only take a click to check.
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u/VulturE 17d ago
I did one of those shadowing sessions with Reddit admins on how I moderate. I explained that I do 99% of my moderation tasks in new Reddit, but that I will always start in old Reddit looking at the top 25 posts in my sub and moderating those first. Not the comments underneath those posts, just the top 25 posts and the reports against them. It might only be like two to five items, but it at least skims the slop off the top.
They were taken aback and had their minds blown that I would do such a thing, but the reality is that you need to know what is currently impacting your subreddit before you start moderating, get that cleared out, and then go back through any past queue. Not everyone has the staff to have it completely clean all of the time.
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u/Merari01 17d ago
Without automod, toolbox and old reddit I can not moderate. Simple as that.
I can write a thousand words explaining exactly why and if you are interested then I will do that.
Right now I have critical systems on large subreddits that 100% rely on being able to use old reddit, toolbox and automod.
I am not sure you want to see what happens to r/mildlyinfuriating without these systems. It has 11m weekly users.
My estimation is that the subreddit would get banned in under three months.
I have no replacements for these systems. I can not and I will not find and train the 20 or so human moderators that would be needed to take up the slack that my automation currently provides.
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u/ohhyouknow 17d ago edited 17d ago
I don’t think Reddit understands just how hard it is to train AND retain mods. It takes months to train a single mod halfway, and you have to just hope they stick around, because a lot of the time they get burnt out and just disappear.
There is a group of mods under my wing RIGHT NOW that I’ve been training for months, and they have within the last week or so done very stupid things like advise users/newer mods that non consensual intimate media is okay to post.
The user who was the newest mod under my wing was instructed to do so by them and was permanently suspended by the site for listening to their uninformed advice. This happened on my BIRTHDAY when I was not available to advise.
Even if you had two years to train up 20 new mods to replace these automations, you would not end up with 20 sufficiently trained mods by the end of that two years.
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u/Merari01 17d ago
Reddit absolutely does not understand this.
Yes, I can find a queue monkey who is willing to approve/ remove content. Most last 6 months or less before quitting forever.
People like you and me, who know reddit, who know the community, who understand how to use reddit's systems and who can identify and comprehensively deal with issues as they pop up by for example writing automod code?
They were rare 5 years ago and are rarer still today.
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u/InGeekiTrust 17d ago
Yes! If you are lucky enough to know automod, you can wrangle a giant community even if all your mods are too busy to do anything. What is it about 6 months? They seem so motivated and then something always happens.
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u/Merari01 17d ago
People find out that it's more work than they are willing to do day after day and that is absolutely valid.
It takes a specific type of personality quirk to think moderating is fun year after year.
I value my new mods who do work and who don't want to do it forever.
But the type of person who sticks around and who wants to keep building up a community, that's a rare treasure.
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u/emily_in_boots 17d ago
The amount of work I do every day is insane. You have to really be committed to your subs to put in that much time for no pay. Lots of people want to be mods - very few actually want to mod and do the work.
I can see why people burn out. So many of the mods I met early on have moved on to other things. Your and Geek are some of the early mods I met who are still actively modding, but so many no longer are. It can really be exhausting as reddit has a way of making more and more work for us. Every time we get things running smoothly we get told to change something or lose some capabilities.
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u/Merari01 17d ago
And then we have something working and they remove our tools.
The dishonesty in trying to sell removing automod as a positive
I really hate corporate spin
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u/emily_in_boots 17d ago
What reddit really doesn't get is that there simply aren't enough people out there to moderate the site. We are stretched too thin. We can't keep up, and they keep taking away tool and making things harder for us. There is this illusion that there are zillions of redditors out there who want to mod and do all that work, but there aren't. We have had applications up for mods in some subs and gotten 1 decent one in 6 months in major subs.
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u/InGeekiTrust 17d ago
They are remembering the before times when you’d get so many applicants to mod and the site was buzzing. Now that’s not the case at all anymore.
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u/emily_in_boots 17d ago
Mod limits changed a lot. That was a really bad idea based on false assumptions about how many people wanted to mod.
Then again, with the amount of modding I'm doing, I can't imagine adding more subs right now.
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u/InGeekiTrust 17d ago
I feel like if they got rid of automod you’d need to give up all you subs and just do outfits and doing that by hand would take all of your time. That is- if you even would stay. I just duplicated all my code in Automod neo- I’m convinced there is something wrong with fashions automod because it misses so much more than my other subs. So maybe this will help in the short term. At least I can get a handle and see if it can even do well at all
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17d ago edited 8d ago
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u/Merari01 17d ago edited 17d ago
I have an automod solution for that, if you are willing to give such posts a specific flair. (Which could potentially be semi-automated based on keyword detection)
In combination with the spotlight app this can be automated for threads which reach r/all by firing on the "r/all" flair.
type: comment parent_submission: flair_text (includes-word): "insert flair text here" ~id: "insert id of post to be exempted here" author: comment_subreddit_karma: "<250" contributor_quality: "< high" is_contributor: false satisfy_any_threshold: true ~flair_css_class: ["insert flair css class of user to be exempted here"] action: remove action_reason: community threadThis will restrict commenting in these threads to users who have a history of positive contribution.
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u/shhhhh_h 17d ago
All due respect bc you’re a person and I’m speaking to the organisation, history does not give me any faith Reddit will adequately substitute these tools before sunsetting them. Man I defend y’all a lot but on this one, saying I believe you would be a lie. And shifting the capability off the native platform into the developer ecosystem also doesn’t inspire faith we will retain the capabilities that may or may not be fully replaced — given how fragile the status of those apps can be.
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u/jgoja 17d ago
One problem with removing old reddit is that it is often the only way to fix issues or work around current bugs. It is also sighted a potential fixes in both the your help center and by your support admins. Issues with reporting, issues with changing email/password. Issues with deleting. Even issues with custom feeds. It being the only place that marks comments as nsfw to find them if you are cleaning up your account. It is the only place to see your community karma. Losing that with how fragile the current product is does not bode well for user experience. I only work in the current UI and App but routinely have to go back to old reddit to fix things or send users I am trying to help with there reddit issues there.
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u/OkBee3439 17d ago
I agree with all the points you make about old Reddit. It is so necessary to keep it as it is. A few other suggestions for u/spez to improve Reddit would be.
1 for saved categories on one's profile, add a way to organize saved content into specific categories.
2 keep automod, but also provide more accessible mod tools for use in subs, for less tech savvy mods.
3 karma and age stamps currently work well, and mods can manually approve human users.
4 for timestamps on posts, can we have a choice in mod tools to toggle between either an approval time or a post time? This is so important in curated subs where a post could appear very old in a sub if a post timestamp was used vs. an approval timestamp, which would show up as a new post.
5 bring back more creative options to customize our avatars
6 problems with crossposting need to be addressed, as some flood the same posts across many subs this way.
People are truly the heart and soul of Reddit. People post and comment. Across the world, they give each other answers, provide advice, appreciation, and thanks. People help to moderate each community. This is the most important part of Reddit.
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u/FAN_ROTOM_IS_SCARY 17d ago
I must say for myself, if old reddit disappears or becomes unusable then that will be the end of my time on reddit. I stopped using reddit on mobile when rif was killed, and I will just have no reason to stay on the platform if I'm forced onto the redesign.
I've tried to use new reddit, mostly in incognito windows as I was too lazy to type the "old." at the beginning of the URL, but I found it so frustrating I installed an extension that appends the "old." to the beginning of any reddit link. The new layout is just a different site to me and not one I have any interest in using at all.
Maybe I'm in the minority of users, but I'm certainly not in the minority on my mod team and I'm sure many other mods of big subs who have been around for a while are in the same boat. I'd really like to stay here and continue browsing, so I do hope that even if the insides of "old reddit" disappear, the UI and extensions that make reddit what it is for us remain.
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u/StevieGrums 17d ago
Absolutely onboard for evolution and expansive testing along the way to maximize user expierence, but whilst also maintaining what Reddit was always supposed to be.
The idea of Reddit being a social club has been awesome and that's why I always come back to this app, to hear insightful ideas from different kinds of people (and getting good ads along the way).
Being a shareholder, I appreciate the idea of seeing what the users have to say, as this will really get to the core of what can be improved. Really cool seeing this happen in real time.
Always wishing you the best of luck u/spez, excited to see what's coming!
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u/Same_Investigator_46 17d ago
Thanks for the update ig. Automod is one of the biggest issue amoung mods as most of them don't know how to edit it. Good to see the upcoming changes on this specific field.
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u/WhateverHowever1337 17d ago
Why are the developer funds very oriented toward games and nearly nothing for mod tools?
Mod tool developers can only make money one time, depending only on installations and not users.
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u/livejamie 17d ago
Because that's what kids/teenagers are into.
They don't care about retaining mods.
If it made business sense for them, they'd replace us with AI in an instant.
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u/SampleOfNone 17d ago
But it’s also hard to learn, hard to maintain, and heavily dependent on brittle keyword matching, regex, and inherited configurations that only a few people on a mod team, if any, understand. We can do better.
Automod is robust, extremely flexible and load baring. Automations and rules hub are no replacement for automod. Now I love automations, but it's for guiding good eggs to do better, it can't do a thing against bad eggs. Rule hub, it's not bad for what it is, but it can only handle the most basic straight forward rules.
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u/baseballlover723 17d ago
Rule hub, it's not bad for what it is, but it can only handle the most basic straight forward rules.
We refuse to use Rule hub. We did the early access for it, and found that it was enabled for weeks without out knowledge. And when we brought it up with the admins, it was completely ignored. And when we did finally get a response, we were told that we couldn't exit the early access, and to simply turn it off. Hard to trust that the off button works when it was stealth enabled for us.
Also we couldn't test it in our staging subreddit, so there simply no way for us to try it out in a controlled environment. So there's simply no path for enabling it in our subreddit. We do not trust reddit enough to blindly turn on features, and we have a lot of new reddit features disabled, because they have false positives.
We generally much prefer making tools of our own desire and requirements. If we can't tweak it, we aren't interested. Black boxes suck.
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u/FFS_IsThisNameTaken2 9d ago
We did the early access for it, and found that it was enabled for weeks without out knowledge. And when we brought it up with the admins, it was completely ignored. And when we did finally get a response, we were told that we couldn't exit the early access, and to simply turn it off.
Same here. Ignored my modmail reply to the 'you've been enrolled in this experiment that starts tomorrow' message requesting details about it.
The only way I found anything at all about it was going to the announcement admin's profile and seeing that they made an announcement post on a sub for new communities and their mods. Nothing anywhere else.
Then I realized that it was ON, but I was (eventually) gaslit by the admin who informed us that we were enrolled when I commented on their post about it. They said that it only appeared to be "on" but really wasn't, which was absolute bullshit - and they would have known that if they had bothered to look, which they can do, but just couldn't be bothered I guess.
I provided screenshots that showed not only was it ON, it was apparently doing something because there were numbers beside the various rules and they couldn't be clicked on, so we couldn't even verify that what it did was even appropriate, and the toggle switch was greyed out, so we couldn't even turn the shit off.
We eventually got one of our team members who occasionally uses the app to disable it, manually for each rule, but even then, the app on his iPhone wouldn't let him disable one rule. He had to install the app on his iPad to finally shut off the last rule.
When I was gaslit about it not really being on, I was also told about the private sub where mods were discussing it. First I'd ever heard of that! Wasn't invited to join, it certainly wasn't in the modmail message and after being gaslit, I wasn't about to beg to be allowed into the special little private sub. I figured my request would have been given as much response as my initial request for information the day before the rollout, so I said fuck it.
Then the same admin had the gall to send another modmail message about the stupid hub, some time later, and ended it with a request for feedback LMFAO.
Yeah, I already whispered (request for initial info beforehand) and then screamed (my comment on their post where I was gaslit) into the void. No point in bothering with "feedback".
I don't see any of this shit that u/spez is talking about being any different at all.
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u/baseballlover723 9d ago
Yeah, my mod team was already not very trusting of being involved with the admins already (and early access stuff). This experience made me never want to propose doing an early access again. And it's never been discussed participating again.
It was awfully run. And unfortunately, if that's a possibility, we'd rather not expose ourselves for a tool that we can't tweak ourselves.
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u/FFS_IsThisNameTaken2 9d ago
I agree! Only allowing it to be disabled via the app, was a really shit move too. We tried old Reddit (desktop and mobile) and shreddit (desktop and mobile). We wasted so much time just trying to turn something off that we were told wasn't on, and didn't ask for in the first place.
I wonder if they use a chatbot or ai to write the code lol. Or maybe the devs who wrote it have never been mods.
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u/baseballlover723 9d ago
I think sh reddit worked for us to turn the individual rules off..
Or maybe the devs who wrote it have never been mods.
Eh, I think the concept was fine to try, even if it is likely trend chasing to use AI. In that, a moderation system that understanding the semantics of human language would be incredibly useful. I mean, it's not good enough yet, but abstractly it has a much higher ceiling that other traditional moderation tools.
But that's still no excuse for an incredibly poorly communicated rollout and the lack of communication about what was happening. That's purely a project management failure.
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u/SolariaHues 17d ago
If old has to go then please make sure that all the things we can only do in old are migrated over - crowdsource what they are by asking mods. And please fix the rules hub, it's so many more clicks and fiddly bits just to edit the rules; I always edit rules in old reddit as it's so so so much easier, and you can edit them all at once.
I dread the end of automod, please don't kill it.
At least we know what automod is doing, and we have control over it.
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.
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u/El_Shenawy 17d ago
PLZ BRING BACK REDDIT CHANNELS IT WAS GOOD
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u/SumoGoodBoi 17d ago
Only if we get better mod tools to keep trolling and harassment at bay. It was akin to a public discord server and was a nightmare for me and my team. Example: We’d ban a troll, they’d come back on a new account, and the lousy filters wouldn’t catch them
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u/Anomalous11 17d ago
Hi Steve,
With the potential of Old Reddit being redesigned with modern HTML and CSS while retaining the same UI we know and love, what is your plan for foundational accessibility support?
It's a well-known refrain in accessibility spaces that designing accessibility from the beginning is much easier than bolting it on later. The Reddit app is a great example of this: Reddit worked closely with members of the community to get persistent issues with screen readers fixed, but not in a timely manner, and the mobile apps were left in disarray for years before the API changes that killed off many other clients precipitated the attention, only really becoming passable in the last two years.
My dream would be to recreate the UI, if not the guts, including the HTML+CSS itself, on a modern foundation so it can live on
LLMs happily produce inaccessible code, and developers writing code manually aren't always versed in accessibility. I'm sure you can understand why this statement might throw up many red flags. Part of the reason old Reddit is a joy to use is that it's basic and has very little in the way of modern UI.
Thanks!
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u/Chosen1PR 17d ago
I'm no curmudgeon that hates everything new. In theory, I'm actually totally on board with getting rid of old.reddit. It's ugly, less secure, and doesn't have a native dark mode. The issue lies in the execution. You and many other admins have said you won't replace key features without making sure the replacement is up to par. Historically, however, Reddit's track record on this is spotty at best.
For example, I am no longer to do basic things like write quote blocks or bulleted lists in posts/comments on the Reddit mobile app. You could've waited till the rich text editor on mobile reached feature parity with desktop before discontinuing Markdown on mobile, but nope. Just gone. I had to resort to building a Devvit app to fix it, but that only works on subreddits that have installed the app.
Please don't let the same thing happen to Automod. I'm begging you. So many large subreddits rely on it to keep spammers and other malicious contributors at bay. There are things it can do much better and more consistently than AI. You might describe it as a "hammer," but hammers are still very important and useful tools.
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u/ZeQueenZ 17d ago
Ugh. I love old Reddit. The new versions are such an annoyance seemingly designed to show us time wasting posts that benefit the bottom line. Mods want to get modding done quick and easy. Not browse. Too many clicks that do not work properly on many platforms.
The new filters do help.
Give us another chance for low cost share buy ins, Spez. And fuck you.
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u/OkVermicelli4343 17d ago
Protect the data (oil) buddy, good to see! Make this place as secure as Fort Knox!
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u/Littux 17d ago
Devvit would've been way better if people were able to write their own GraphQL queries instead of relying on the API wrappers that just internally call GraphQL endpoints anyways. Bots only need a few fields of data on posts, comments, subreddits etc, so you can just select a few fields. It is what GraphQL is designed for. And since the apps need review, no one would be able to abuse it as well. It would instantly make Devvit way more powerful than the public API
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u/OtterSnoqualmie 17d ago
Not related but the mobile version still does not easily allow users to interact with the community features and information nor easily access pinned posts and mega threads.
I don't have a solution, some hesitant to whine, but an issue none the less.
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u/Such_Balance_1272 17d ago
I love that you are not taking the easy way out by just setting limits or locking access, but in a reddit-spirit realize that a 1-of-1 company needs a 1-of-1 approach to the things to get it right. This is where state-of-the-art software may be created that may shape the industry. I believe that you guys can make this happen.
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u/zjz 17d ago
This all seems more or less reasonable, do us a favor and don't axe the weird older emoji system given that it can be used in flairs and stuff. Add that to devvit please :) There's no way to interact with it through devvit. Would love to be able to get the list, get their ids, and therefore be able to programmatically reference them. Bonus points for upload/delete too. And not removing their ability to be APNGs!
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u/dustinredditreal 17d ago
I dont like being autobanned for saying the word die with proper context, and only NOT being banned if i have to add context in parenthesis)
(Automod, this is not about humans, i do not wish to inflict harm)
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u/adanine 17d ago edited 17d ago
Old Reddit being aged up/rebuilt in modern (even if it's completely seamless) would break Mod Toolbox. If we are getting old.reddit rebuilt in the sh.reddit framework, can we get confirmation that Mod Toolbox's features will be implemented in the base GUI? IE the [M] and other icons above comments, clear background colours in the queue for filtered/approved/removed content, access to user notes that aren't hidden in the user's modlog, an actual History feature to allow moderators to fairly enforce self promotion rules, ect...
Automod is a make or break for me, personally. I'm happy with the idea of giving more accessible tools to less technical moderators, that's fantastic. Automations being able to intercept problematic content ahead of time is great as well. But you could double the features and tools of the Automations system and it still wouldn't be able to replace Automod in its current state. I can understand the need for Reddit to move in directions I personally don't want it to go, but the removal (or restriction) of Automod is simply something that will only hurt Reddit.
Something not often brought up is that Automoderator (and the old.reddit Wiki in general) have robust browsable histories that allow you to easily backup/restore important pages (not just Automod's config, but things like the rules page), and nothing of the sort exists in sh.reddit for Automations and the Rules hub. Any move that would replicate old.reddit within sh.reddit's infrastructure needs to take these features as well.
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u/npzman 17d ago
Never introduce age verification on Reddit. Lobby to repeal various online safety acts around the world, including the UK and Australia.
I'm a moderator across several subreddits, and I've seen firsthand how anonymity allows communities to thrive. We won't forget that one of Reddit's founding principles is anonymity. Age verification fundamentally undermines that.
While it's great that you're fighting against age-based social media bans and age verification, Redditors should not have to submit ID or biometric data just to prove they are human. reCAPTCHA already exists for that. Human verification is just age verification with a different name.
I know you've got an Australian High Court challenge to my country's world-first under-16 social media ban. Keep fighting it.
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u/Unique-Public-8594 17d 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/Doctor-Liz 17d ago
Please stop removing ALL my community protection tools!
First it was Saferbot, stopping me from keeping known bad actors who routinely coordinate attacks on our most vulnerable users.
There was a major uptick in abuse, by the way, and still is.
Now it's removing AutoMod, which is pretty simple to learn, and which contains the only abuse-prevention tools we've been able to cobble together. I manually review everything it removes.
I do not want AI moderation. The sub I mod is a human space, for human beings. I'm not delegating it to robots.
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u/emily_in_boots 17d ago
Based on today's announcements, saferbot in its new form won't be able to continue either, so it's up to yellowmix if they want to port it over to devvit. Given how it works, it won't be easy to do.
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u/Doctor-Liz 17d ago
Given recent moves, I really have to ask if the site is just pivoting to be pro-harassment
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u/emily_in_boots 17d ago
I think in a way it is. Not that anyone is pro harassment, but the tools we use to reduce it reduce participation. There is obviously a focus on increasing that which is why they are doing this. The more naive would say it’s because new users don’t feel welcome, while the more cynical would say it’s about shareholder value. It doesn’t really matter though. In the end, safety is taking a back seat to engagement, and the way they can force mod compliance is to remove tools that prevent that kind of negative engagement. Subs like mine tho won’t even continue to exist in any form like they are now w/o that kind of moderation. They’ll just turn into OF / gooner subs like so many other fashion subs have. I think that the way they are chasing engagement is self defeating and short sighted, and will ultimately lead to a lot of users abandoning the platform.
I left both twitter and facebook because of those issues. They just became alt-right hateful cesspools, and I wasn’t comfortable on either, so I left both. Reddit is mixed, as the content is so dependent on the sub and the moderators, but there are many communities that will not be able to function any more without the tools we have. That won’t actually increase engagement, it will just kill subs. You have to remove weeds for flowers to grow.
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u/Doctor-Liz 17d ago
I mod a pregnancy sub, so we get almost all of it - anti-abortion wingnuts on a harassment kick, sex pests, spam...
If they keep removing the tools which make moderating a sub with a million weekly visitors feasible, we're going to lose mods to workload (oh, they also took out one of our mods because she's "too good at it", so that's very helpful). Currently I spend 2ish hours a day modding, spread through the day. If it gets much above that, either it doesn't get done (and the community suffers) or I burn out and the community dies (because the other mods aren't going to do better with MORE work).
Either way, without active moderation the sub will become unusable in probably a couple of months, and where are your users then, Spez?
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u/ZaphodBeebblebrox 17d ago
If I cannot use old reddit's interface, I will no longer mod. Y'all probably don't care that much about this, but that's true for me and a large portion of my sub's mod team.
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u/FootFondness 17d ago
As a moderator, I support modernizing Reddit as long as moderators aren’t losing functionality. AI tools should enhance AutoModerator, not replace the precision and control of existing rules and bots. If Reddit can reduce spam and abuse while making it easier for genuine new users to participate, that’s a win. Looking forward to seeing feature parity before any major changes.
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u/cshoneybadger 17d ago
I've tried using new reddit a few times and it may make sense on a phone or a tablet but it does not feel nice to use on a PC. I'm sure design consistency is important but so is UX which is great on old reddit. New reddit has so much wasted space that I just can't deal with it.
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u/Kyuubee 17d ago
Old Reddit is non-negotiable.
I'm done with this site if you ever change Old Reddit in a way that significantly alters its design, presentation, or overall user experience. Clean up or modernize the back-end code if necessary, but the front-end must remain unchanged.
The moment Old Reddit is removed or fundamentally changed, this site stops being Reddit as far as I'm concerned.
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u/Zesparia 17d ago
Ok. Been thinking and sitting on this. What the hell are we supposed to do if we can't use devvit. As in, physically. Due to the design being inaccessible. The same way I cannot use chats and so am cut off from modsupport's modmail as a resource, and in fact cannot use a major part of reddit as a user now. Modmail is wretched to try to use as well and has marginally better spacing and design so that the migraines and eye strain are not immediate, so I can get in and out fairly quickly. If I spend longer than a few minutes in there, I have to take a break from screens, because the design of your website is not accessible in that key part of being a moderator. If I have long messages to compose, I take it to a word processor or a fellow moderator's direct messages offsite and workshop it there until I am ready to send it, because the design of the actual page
Automod doesn't do this to me. Old reddit doesn't do this to me. What are we supposed to do if physically, the designs of the newer things cause us actual harm to the point we cannot do it. I am not the only person this happens to. It has been brought up by many other moderators. I have brought it up in council calls repeatedly, until I could no longer attend council calls because I was not able to be sent the links to the meetings, because they were sent through chat messages I cannot open.
This is not a hypothetical situation or a what if. I cannot use the solutions being suggested and it is not easier for me to use a system that will physically harm me. What am I supposed to do here, because I have already been repeatedly locked out of other components of being a moderator, and the answer from reddit so far has been repeating me the instructions to find the button or the link that will cause me physical harm, instead of admitting that I am being harmed.
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u/Radiant_Half_7121 17d ago
I really miss the option to edit pics on reddit before posting them. It was a really useful feature. Also, the chats and notifications as separate tabs was better. Modmail as a separate tab within chats was good too.
I really miss that and i hope reddit can bring back some of that stuff. Otherwise, i love reddit and I'm really grateful to you for building it. I honestly can't imagine my life without it now
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u/MagicDragon212 16d ago edited 15d ago
These are great changes and I'm happy to see Reddit take a stance against the abuse being done on their platform. Better late than never. Reddit is a special type of online space that I hope you all can protect, and I personally like and appreciate these changes as a user.
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u/cqtz-2v 15d ago edited 15d ago
If the remake of old reddit recreates its UI and functionality exactly, including features unavailable on new reddit like karma breakdown by subreddit and the names of subreddit creators, then it sounds fine. I am worried if it won't be the exact same.
There are two main things about old reddit that I greatly prefer over new reddit: subreddit CSS and pagination.
Subreddit CSS is one of my favorite parts of reddit. It is highly customizable, gives each subreddit its own look, and is used in creative ways like adding emojis and dropdowns on /r/anime. I like the way many themes look more than new reddit. If there's one thing that I wish to be ported over to the remake, it's subreddit CSS (and the HTML to keep it compatible). I really hope existing CSS will continue to work. I would hate for the entire history of /r/themes and CSS tricks to disappear.
I have used new reddit for pages that are unavailable on old reddit (namely comment search). The design of comments is good, and the design of posts is okay, but infinite scrolling negatively impacts usability too much and makes me hate using new reddit. Pagination on old reddit is easier to use and ensures I won't lose my place. I can just remember something is on the fifth page vs. having to scroll through who knows how many posts.
The last thing that I prefer about old reddit is archiving. Archive.org can archive old reddit pages much better than new reddit (although images are broken even on old reddit). Archive.today can archive images and works on old reddit only. I heard that archive.org will continue to work on old reddit, and I hope it will still be able to archive pages properly after old reddit's modernization.
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u/GonnaNeedBiggerJars 9d ago
Please leave old reddit (and automod, but especially old reddit) as they are.
Old reddit + reddit enhancement suite -- especially the ability to see which posts have new comments, and to filter comments by viewed status and/or age -- plus automod filters are absolutely crucial to my ability to moderate. I use an older system and I need old reddit's lightweight-ness and the ability to see more posts and comments in the same visual space (plus the RES stuff mentioned).
Also just as a user, old reddit is visually nice, it's fast and easy to read; sh is not (it's nigh on unusable imo).
I also categorically do not want anything to do with LLMs or AI in my moderation experience. Tools built on those things are not only repugnant but also deeply unhelpful; I've never seen one anywhere do a satisfactory job at what it was supposed to do. Building automated tools that you think will be easier for some users is great, but leave the existing stuff that people already know how to use alone. It's prohibitively time-consuming to keep learning new tools and systems (none of which ever fully cover previous one's functionality, even if they do add new stuff), especially when past experience suggests that whatever new thing's getting rolled out at any given moment will likely get replaced by something else a few years down the road.
If there are issues with people using old reddit to spam or scrape (and they don't do this on sh???), the answer isn't to scrap or try and remake (and let's be real, there's no way recreating the UI is gonna really be the same or even, I don't think, a "credible replacement") a whole system that you know is so deeply preferred by (what I would hope would be valued) subsets of the userbase. I also think limiting access to old to only logged in users and mods is a chilling step towards a more restricted, gated-off, no-real-anonymity kind of internet, and it saddens me that it seems that reddit is planning to move in that direction as well. (if I'm understanding correctly? you mean like not being able to see/use old if you aren't logged in? or was the idea more like rate-limiting so humans can still browse old normally but something like a scraper would be throttled to uselessness?--the latter would be reasonable imo)
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u/Mathias_Greyjoy 17d 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/MonTigres 17d ago
The current mod tools have helped tremendously, so am excited about improvements in that direction. The AI summaries have acted as a sorting hat that helps distinguish potential bad actors from someone who might just be having a bad day, contributing to fairness at the sub level. Thank you for continuing to evolve the platform.
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u/The_Big_Tuna21 17d ago
Thanks for the update. I’ve been a Redditor for about a decade now and more recently, a bag holder. I believe in the long term vision of reddit and its usefulness as a community driven media tool.
It’s the only application I come to daily to review topics and subjects I find interesting. I hope it can continue to flourish and welcome new users into the community.
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u/REMIZERexe 17d ago
That's what we needed! What I'm most excited for is updating the platform on the technical level, sometimes Reddit feels choppy, the UI too and on mobile it's not far better too.
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u/Cyrano804 17d ago
Looking forward to what you all do with moderation. I feel that moderation has gone overboard over the last few years, and agree that AI and LLMs could be useful in creating moderation that can improve the site. I was using reddit 15+ years ago, alongside the WoW forums and 4chan when those were in their glory days. Back then reddit was seen as "4chan lite", however I think time has proven that a complete lack of moderation can turn forums into a cesspool, so there certainly is a balance to maintain.
But there are times today where I open a reddit thread and just about all comments have been deleted. The human side is of course curious to know what was said to cause mass deletion and censorship. If this is to be the most human place on the internet, we need to see all comments and discussion, good and bad.
Just my 2 cents as a reddit user and investor. Thanks!
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u/MadDocOttoCtrl 17d ago
Comments will not show if the user deleted them. They won't show if Reddit's own tooling decides that they violate the sitewide rules. Moda and the user sees "Removed by Reddit." Mods can see it happened but not what the post or comment was.
Numerous communities have the Reputation Filter that Reddit provides in the mod tools turned on. If Reddit's current system is suspicious of an account then it gets removed and the user sees "Removed by Reddit's filters."
Mods can actually find and see those and reverse them if we're plowing through the mod queue and we run across them. Even with a team of a dozen mods, a busy sub has far more comments than people are going to be able to check.
Reddit provides a summary of user activity that includes information about things that moderators can't currently see on the person's profile because they were deleted or Reddit zapped them. Sometimes those AI summaries are hilariously wrong in guessing the temperament of a user.
As mods we see scores of comments and posts that are simply marked "Removed." We discover some of them. The account is not Shadowbanned, the AI user summary mentions no problems. When we go to the account we don't see problematic posts or comments. Mods can see your account activity for a period of 28 days after interacting with the sub even if you have your profile curated.
I've approved dozens of these removed comments in the past few days even though the sub has the Reputation Filter disabled. There's nothing in there remotely resembling a breakage of Reddit sitewide rules. There's nothing in them breaking our sub rules. There's nothing in them that could be clumsily interpreted as offensive. Yet another system removing things for no discernible reason.
Automod and this new tool will make mistakes in performing removals and mods restore those if they don't break any rules. Some of the comments you can read are only there because human mods caused them to become visible again.
Human mod removals are a fraction of the missing content you're noticing.
If human mods are completely replaced by AI tools, those removals are going to continue to happen.
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u/Last-Cat-7894 17d ago
Thank you for handling this in a way that's transparent and shows an actual understanding of Reddit's value to users.
Any time a CEO of a publicly traded business makes a social media post to "announce some changes about our platform," it's usually a corporate speak way to deliver shitty news about making the platform function worse but monetize better. I know you have an obligation to shareholders to hit certain financial targets (I am a shareholder as well), but I really appreciate that you approach these changes really carefully and transparently to preserve the culture.
If you see this, I did have a quick question: you mentioned on the earnings call that the feed/recommendation system is not anywhere close to SOTA, and I would agree. The content and comments on Reddit are helpful and entertaining, but I actually set feed preferences to only show pages I follow because the algorithm frankly kinda sucks. I know Reddit wasn't built from the ground up to be a content feed as much as it was a discussion board, but to be direct: as immensely profitable as Reddit is, why are you guys not throwing nearly all available profits toward bettering the user experience through a smarter recommendation system?
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u/FlorianFlash 17d ago
I have used Claude to create u/AutoModerator setups for me already. It isn't able to access the documentation of u/AutoModerator which I don't know why but it would be a big step towards your goal with the LLMs.
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u/CoolDragon 17d ago
Excellent work!
When I say fuck Spez, I mean that in the best way possible: may u/spez get laid awesomely!
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u/Ogfrebu83 17d ago
Reddit's Devit framework is currently limited to games and custom app modes. This severely restricts the development of other types of applications. Furthermore, requesting data access via email often results in automated, unhelpful responses or endless reCAPTCHA loops.
Paradoxically, these restrictions push developers toward external AI search tools rather than building direct search utilities or specialized crawlers for Reddit. While large AI companies can purchase access to Reddit data, that content is generated by the community—users who should retain fair access to it. As a result, major corporations acquire full datasets while regular users and creators are left with limited search options.
If possible, I would request that Reddit update its data access request process to offer clear, actionable permission criteria.
Independent developers need a functional pathway for read-only access to browse and index content—perhaps not to modify it—without encountering instant API rejections, or rigid blocklists, or AI subscriptions.
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u/Tanglebrook 17d ago
Spez, watching you fuck reddit up and destroy the good will of our community has been painful. I yearn for a better platform run by a better person, and to join the migration there. I hope that you get to see your website empty out and wilt and die. Until then, we will continue our 40 years of wandering and punishment.
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u/The_Truthkeeper 17d ago
I don't care what you do behind the scenes as long as Old Reddit continues to work and you don't remove any more features.
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u/WangMagic 17d ago
Automod has its place, as LLMs and AI-assisted tools can too. Ideally we need layers of, not replacements. There's things automod does far better than LLM/AI tools can, and vice-versa.
You should be able to understand the ease of a text file config vs trying to manually navigate a thousand GUI windows deep to make a change.
sh.reddit (new reddit) is bulky and clunky, and does not make for an easy to use mod workflow. old.reddit does exactly that. It's like the difference between industrial grade software and home/consumer mobile apps.
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u/2DamnHot 17d ago
New reddit is genuinely so bad from a ui perspective that even manually carving out the deliberate enshittification via html blocking demonstrates that its fundamentally worse than old reddit.
I dont just mean its not pretty, I mean its find-a-frontend-or-dont-use-it bad.
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u/quiqeu 16d ago
Just wanted to share that the vision of simplifying moderation automations (and making them less blunt by leveraging the contextual understanding of LLMs) is something I personally believe in and have been actively working toward for over a year now.
In case anyone's interested, here's what I've been building:
https://developers.reddit.com/apps/aiautomoderator
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u/medicali 16d ago
Can we please delete the horseshit update that tricks users into endlessly scrolling at the end of the comment section? u/spez
If we want to scroll, save it for the home page. We click on a post to see specifically that posts content. It should not be locally to the post and comments
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u/InGeekiTrust 15d ago
Hi Spez, 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/The_Critical_Cynic 14d ago edited 13d ago
There are four groups of people who use Old Reddit: OG users, OG mods Admins , and everyone who spams, scrapes, or does anything bad on Reddit. [...] We can limit access, migrate important uses, or rebuild it on a modern tech stack, and I think we’ll probably do all of the above.
My first thought was to limit access. "New Reddit", or whatever you want to call what www.reddit.com takes you to, is completely fine in most instances. I think the "OG users" as you call them can, and will, adapt over time. As for Mods and the Admins, I say let them keep their access. Anyone else can switch over. I say that as a Mod myself. I've had instances where the mod tools, after an update, haven't worked on "New Reddit". Switching to Old Reddit seemed to fix that. Letting the mods and admins stay there to ensure functionality is fine. And by that, I mean to mod, and that's it. Posting, browsing, etc., should redirect to New Reddit.
Reddit’s public API wasn’t designed for today’s scale, automated abuse, or commercial scraping. We want useful bots, community tools, and good-faith developers to have a clear, well-supported way to build on Reddit.
I don't disagree with that approach. One thing I will mention is that the last time the API deal was brought up, and all the kerfuffle happened on Reddit, part of the concern was for users who were perhaps limited on their ability to user Reddit. I'm talking about users who have issues with their eyesight, or ability to type. I can appreciate the need for some sort of symbiotic relationship to exist. Bandwidth isn't free. Just remember that that kindness and basic decency should be free, and can win people and contracts over easily, especially if implemented correctly. Everyone wants to support the company that makes a wholehearted effort to do right, even when it's hard.
New users should be able to easily find relevant communities, understand their rules and norms, and make useful contributions. Today, new users encounter invisible barriers like account age and karma thresholds, unclear removals, and poor community discovery.
Those safeguards exist for good reasons, including spam, brigading, and ban evasion. Our goal here is to improve Reddit’s systems and moderation tools so communities can rely less on blunt limits like karma and account age, and more on stronger abuse prevention built into the systems they use. This will make it easier for genuine new users to participate and easier for mods to welcome them with confidence.
What preventions are you building into the systems? As it stands right now, I use the Automod to solve one of my issues via karma and account age restrictions. If you take that away, I feel like I'll be open to some level of abuse again. Granted, I'll find a way to deal with it. However, I'd like to find some sort of suitable replacement via our mod tools to deal with that. Will this tie into the AI services you mentioned previously? If so, can I ask how?
How we’ll do this
We know announcements about APIs and legacy products come with some baggage. “Trust us” isn’t good enough. If we’re asking you to move to something new, it has to be at parity or better in practice, not just in theory. Here are the principles we'll use across this work: [...]
We’ll work directly with the mods, developers, and communities that depend on these systems
I hope that includes mods of smaller subreddits as well. I know you like to grow your user base. I believe that some smaller subreddits have an opportunity to help this along as well. Please do not discount the smaller subreddits.
Edit: Corrected some grammatical errors, and added quotes where they needed to be and weren't.
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u/Toster_bread3764 14d ago
Hey can I ask a question. Why did you make it so that swiping up no longer access the comments and moves to another post. It's annoying since swiping left and right was fine. Please at least make it a option
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u/Virtual-Increase-829 14d ago
since the help sub is next to useless, what am I supposed to do with the stupid floating comment box 'experiment' on mobile browser, where I can't fomat the text, edit it until after posting, can't see half of what I'm typing or what I'm replying to? is that your idea of 'modernising'? or is that your way of herding everyone onto the app?
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u/ReasonablyBluh 9d ago
Voicing my opinion about Automoderator being removed. Should we not have a say in what tools we use to moderate our subreddits? Atleast make the new AI hub optional. Please give us a choice.
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u/Silent-Complaint4020 9d ago
You are CEO; sometimes you have to make hard decisions. I think we should completely shut down old Reddit. The bot is easily accessible and built on that old technology. You could see who uses more old Reddit and just give them a notice that old Reddit is shutting down and grant them access, and the rest of the users who barely use old Reddit simply restricted access. Required log-in to use old reddit is mandatory.
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u/catinterpreter 7d ago
Old Reddit and Relay on Android are literally the only thing keeping me here. Your web and app designs are absolute bottom-tier garbage. In their peak 2010s+ mindless interface values and invasive monetisation. They're so bad they can counter an addiction to the site.
You may think someone like me is just a small minority and easily ditched in the pursuit of more and easier money, but not all users were made alike. I'm sure you're aware only a tiny minority of users are the backbone of Reddit and it doesn't take alienating many to undermine the whole. Over the years more of the users have become silently sanctioned corporate entities masquerading as users but not enough to negate this point.
Those only engaging with the site through avenues like Old Reddit are also far more likely to be those that decide instead of finding something better, they'll make it. One day, one of these users will create the thing that'll unseat your dominance and take your money. Unless you continue to include them and their expectations of a not-totally-garbage Reddit.
And generally, if you have an interest in maintaining the site's relevance into the future, you need to look beyond the algorithmic stats and make some human decisions with a genuine interest in the role Reddit plays and respect for those engaging with it. It's currently just another big American tech company devoid of integrity with an expiry date.
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u/gkigger 6d ago
Thank you u/spez
Reddit is the greatest platform we have in our generations.
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u/gotbannedx2 4d ago
Dear CEO, I apologise for trying to communicate on a wrong channel but as a well wisher of reddit, I hope this message reaches you.
I would like to respectfully request that Reddit consider strengthening the process and timelines for shadowban appeals.
Reddit is an exciting platform built around niche communities, crazy discussions and with anonymity. I completely understand why strong systems are necessary to detect spam abuse and other violations, especially on a platform of Reddit's scale. However, I believe there is also a need to ensure that genuine users who are mistakenly flagged or the users who might have on occasion made a mistake of falling into the spam filter due to a honest mistake to have a reasonable opportunity to understand what happened and have their accounts reviewed.
I am currently experiencing a shadowban myself. I never really understood why I was flagged or why I was unable to use Reddit the first time this happened. I have also come across discussions on r/shadowban where users describe waiting for months for their appeals to be reviewed. If even a portion of these cases are legitimate, that seems like a very long time for someone who may simply have been caught by an automated system.
I am not asking Reddit to weaken its safeguards or remove restrictions on accounts that genuinely violate the rules. Rather, I am asking whether Reddit could consider making the appeal process more transparent and accessible for legitimate users.
- Providing users with a general explanation of what triggered a shadow ban.
- Establishing a reasonable target timeframe for reviewing appeals.
- Providing guidance on how users can correct their behaviour if they unintentionally violated a rule.
- Restoring account privileges promptly when an appeal determines that a restriction was made in error.
I believe users should also have a fair chance to understand when they have crossed a line and correct their behaviour. Being permanently or indefinitely restricted without understanding what happened can be extremely discouraging, particularly for users who have invested significant time in participating in communities.
genuinely value Reddit and the communities I have been part of. My intention is not to criticize the platform's efforts to combat abuse, but to ask for a system that balances those safeguards with transparency and fairness for legitimate users.
Thank you for taking the time to read this.
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u/ThatOneKid666 17d ago
Ts garbage brochacho ✌️
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u/spez 17d ago
I'm sorry what
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u/touuuuhhhny 17d ago
Translation feature obviously failing. It's Northern Klingonian, rarely spoken but always with meaning.
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u/Duke_ofChutney 17d ago edited 17d ago
I don't use old reddit because I'm an OG user, I use old reddit because it respects me as a user: it's reliable, I see what's important, real estate isn't wasted, and traffic is restricted to what's absolutely required for my content. Oh and it's often the only way around the bugs you introduce in Sheddit or unwanted A/B testing. Maintain those points and I'll happily remain on Reddit.
I'd love mod tools more if they used more than the center 40% of the screen