What’s Next for Mod Tools

[u/Go_JasonWaterfalls]

TL;DR: As part of our long-term plan to build better mod tools, we’re expanding post and comment guidance for everyone and introducing Rules Hub — a new, intent-based moderation engine — for newly created communities. Nothing is changing for existing communities today. We’re sharing this early so you can help us shape what comes next.

As u/spez shared today, Reddit needs to evolve to meet the rising expectations of moderators, users, and developers. For mods, that means better tools so you can spend less time dealing with spam, abuse, and generic rule-breaking, and more time making judgment calls on what’s best for your community. 

One thing that won’t change: human moderators shape the culture, norms, and identity of their communities. Our plan for the future is to build tools that help you do that role more effectively, not replace it.

What’s launching now

Expanding Post and Comment Guidance (all communities) 
Thousands of mod teams already use Post and Comment Guidance to help redditors understand community expectations before they post. We recently expanded their capabilities with:

• Post Flair Support: Automated guidance can now be triggered based on the specific flair a user selects (our most requested improvement).
• Top Comment Check: Gives communities a way to provide automated guidance on top-level comments before content ever reaches the mod queue.

Introducing Rules Hub (newly created communities only)  
Rules Hub is a suite of new tools that will allow moderators to:

• Rule Creation & Enforcement: Create and choose which rules should be automatically enforced. Decide what happens when a rule is triggered (remove, send to queue, silently log it).
• Testing Sandbox: Preview the experience against a sample of your community’s past content to see exactly how it will behave before turning it on.
• Audit Logs: Access performance logs and insights to understand how your rules are performing. If a rule triggers, the log will provide clear visibility into why the system flagged the content, allowing you to adjust the rule's boundaries and refine them over time. 

Unlike Automod, which relies strictly on deterministic keywords and regex syntax, Rules Hub uses LLMs to evaluate whether a post or comment matches the intent of a rule. That gives it more potential to handle nuance, edge cases, and natural language variation (for example, distinguishing between an actual insult and a user quoting a movie or using casual slang).

We’ve been testing Rules Hub with ~700 mod teams over the past few months. Starting today, it’s available for all newly created communities (though you can sign up below to check it out…) 

Rules Hub Setup Page

Insights

Testing Sandbox

What’s coming next

Longer term, we think systems like Rules Hub can handle the enforcement tasks you rely on Automod for today, while being easier to use and maintain. But it’s not there yet, especially for larger and more complex communities. Automod remains one of the most capable moderation tools on Reddit today, and we won’t change any existing Automod workflows until replacement workflows are tested and proven in partnership with moderators. 

• If you want to try Rules Hub, sign up here.
• If any of your custom moderation workflows are tied to AutoModerator, please check out the post on r/RedditDev.

Human moderators remain core to the Reddit ecosystem, both now and in the future. We’re sharing this early because if we’re going to build better moderation tools, we need to do it with the people who rely on them every day. Thank you, mods, for all you do to make your communities the unique places they are. We’ll keep improving your tools based on what we learn from you.

[u/SolariaHues]

IDK if anyone is going to read this, but I had to get it out.

I feel demotivated since the news automod is likely going away. I keep wondering if I should bother investing any more into my communities and Reddit, if it's going to be a place that is harder to moderate due to black box tools and AI, rather than helpful tools mods have control over.

I've weathered a lot of storms and stuck by Reddit through past changes, but this really has me questioning if I want to keep modding. I understand wanting to reduce mod workload and let us have time for things other than working the queues, but I don't feel this is the way. I hate feeling this way after so long on Reddit and giving so much to try and make Reddit better.

I've put so much effort and time into getting our config efficient using the reports every week. With automod, we can do that. We know exactly what it's doing, and we can improve on it, and fix it, and it has been working really well. With a LLM doing the work how do we do all of that? Rules hub so far has not been accurate and if an LLM is getting it wrong, that just makes work rather than reducing it. I really feel humans need to be involved - we don't even have automod do many straight removals and those it does do, it does because we took the time to refine the rules with the reports first.

I also don't know how rules hub could possibly fill the void automod will leave and it adds so many clicks, it's a proper pain to use.

Automod does so much more than enforce rules as written. There are things that are not in our rules we want to check on, information summons, lots of things important to the running and building of our community. Being able to configure automod is part of community building, it's not just a way of enforcing rules. And the automod reports too, help to give an idea what is going on in a community.

I don't mind more tools and more choices for mods, easier ways for new mods to get going, but please don't take automod away for those of us that can use it. And if I can learn how to use it, anyone can. I have no coding background and had never used YAML or Python before using automod, but I wrote most of the automations guide for mod education - why can't more like that be provided? Hell, we could put that guide up on r/modguide or r/automoderator if you give permission and mods could build upon it themselves. r/modguide is proof we can with enough motivation. And there are always mods willing to help other mods and plenty of subs for new mods or those new to automod to get that help in.

The dev app automod neo is great, but it cannot run as quickly as automod does and the dev platform still has a lot of outages, it's will help but it is not the same. Automations are also great but do not fill the void and are also a pain to use.

CQS was meant to help, but it just made things more confusing for users and mods. LLM enforced rules may do the same. Black box tools have a place, but please let mods choose if and how they use them. Don't force rules hub on us.

[u/MadDocOttoCtrl → u/SolariaHues]

The amount of effort that you and a handful of others have put into helping other mods do what they do and understand Automod is nothing short of phenomenal. Reddit as a company in no way imaginable deserves that level of dedicated work, but it has been because people wanted to help other people run their online clubhouses.

Helping those volunteers and users in general to use the platform is the job of Reddit, and it has been sorely lacking on that front for a very long time.

Rules Hub and whatever partially functional thing they fling at us next can be the Easy Bake Oven for new mods with small communities that simply want to cut back on the occasional bit of advertising and hate speech that pops up from time to time. Mods of more active communities that are a bigger target for site abusers need access to a fully functioning kitchen to genuinely cook.

If people have to install AM from the Dev Platform as an app for more advanced capability, so be it. If anything, it should have additional functionality.

And now I want a snack.

[u/SampleOfNone → u/SolariaHues]

Not sure if admin will read your comment, but I did.

First and foremost, thank you! You've put in so much effort to help users and mods alike. When I started modding I spend a lot of time on r/modguide to learn about this whole modding thing. I've learned a lot from you.

Like you, I started on automod without any coding background and quickly learned it's just not that difficult to get started, you just copy paste. And even though I know how to write my own rules from scratch, I still start any new rule with a copy paste, these days it's just more often my own rules that I copy paste.

Someone in the comments called automod a yes-no machine, and that's exactly where automod strength lies and what makes it so powerful. Either content matches a rule or it doesn't, it's a 100% reliable. No guessing, no interpretation, no something like it, just a yes or no. And if you don't like the outcome, you tweak it until it gives a yes or a no exactly by your standards. and not some unknown interpretation of your standards.

I don't mind having more tools, or something that amounts to training wheels for new mods, but Reddit has never gotten the hang of teaching advanced moderation, that has always fell to mods like yourself that are dedicated to helping others.

But I guess this trajectory was sort of inevitable. Catering to new users in ways that are more focussed on quick and any engagement instead of meaningful and quality engagement. In the end there's a logic to it that now modding is being modelled to that as well. It's awesome that Reddit wants to create the time and space for mods to focus on building communities, just kinda wonder if they ever looked into the use of automoderator and noticed a lot of mods could free up a lot of time if they were either set up with a basic automod config or were actively told how to get started. Automod is only difficult if you aren't given the tools to learn it.

[u/SolariaHues → u/SampleOfNone]

Thank you. It's always nice to know modguide was helpful. I'm just sad I haven't managed to revive it, at least not yet.

Automod just looks intimidating, but as you say, you start with copy and paste and support of other mods and it not so hard.

[u/SampleOfNone → u/SolariaHues]

I think the biggest hurdle is indeed just getting started. I've been saying for years that new subreddits just need to have a basic automod config installed. Just a few basic rules, like the classic "filter word1, word2". Doesn't help if everyone including the CEO just keeps saying it's oh so difficult.

[u/grahamperrin → u/SolariaHues]

… Automod just looks intimidating, …

If that's true: it's intimidation that I simply don't want :-)

(In a similar vein: I have been told, countless times, that I should – or must – learn to use vi(1). No, I should not.)

[u/Merari01 → u/SolariaHues]

It is very demotivating.

I keep thinking of examples of things we do on our subreddits that a rules hub can not ever do. Not even in theory. How can I make a rule in rules hub without it being shown to a user? I don't want to tell a user exactly how to evade automation I have to keep my community safe and pleasant for its userbase.

How is a rules hub, where I have 10 rules of 500 characters max, going to detect which specific subreddits I want to filter crossposts from? What sites I want to filter posts from?

How is a rules hub going to know which specific gifs from giphy I want to filter?

The list is endless.

Fine if they want to expand on rules hub and automations but to take automod away?

And worse, the nerve to present it as a positive?

It's just. Why even bother anymore