Reddit Introduces AI-Powered Rules Hub to Replace Automod Across 100,000+ Communities

Reddit aims to make 'karma' less important for first-time posters with shift to AI moderation tools

Reddit on Wednesday announced a series of changes to its infrastructure and tools, designed to make it easier for people to participate on its site, protect against scraping and spam, and aid in the moderation of its online communities. In addition to providing a new suite of moderation tools, the company said it's working on more advanced abuse prevention systems that could eventually help communities move away from using things like account age and "karma" to determine who's allowed to post. Karma, Reddit's digital reputation system, allows users to raise their score by posting and commenting helpful, friendly, or funny responses that lead to upvotes. Originally designed to weed out spam, bots, and trolls, many communities came to rely on karma and other account-age restrictions that make it difficult for legitimate newcomers to participate in their communities. Reddit says it now wants to shift to stronger, built-in abuse prevention systems to do more of the moderation work, so communities can be more open to new users. Reddit didn't say karma would go away entirely with these coming changes, but it did suggest that its importance could dwindle in the future. "This will make it easier for genuine new users to participate and easier for mods to welcome them with confidence," Reddit's announcement stated. Related to this, the company said it's expanding the test of its new suite of AI-powered moderation tools, the Rules Hub, which helps moderators by choosing when to automatically enforce certain community rules and what action should be taken when doing so. Initially used by 700-plus communities, Reddit says that all new communities can now test the tool. Later this year, the tool will be widely available to all communities, both new and existing. With Rules Hub, Reddit uses large language models (LLMs) to determine whether a post or comment matches the intent of a rule, which the company says allows it to "better handle nuance," natural language, and edge cases. Reddit also expanded the capabilities of other tools, including one that helps moderators inform users about their community's rules when posting and commenting, and another that helps members set their flair -- a custom tag users append to their name that only appears in the community they're posting in. "Today, new users can encounter invisible barriers like account age and karma thresholds, unclear removals, and poor community discovery," Reddit explained. "We want new users around the world to be able to easily find relevant communities, understand their rules and norms, and make useful contributions." The company also said it would make changes to its legacy desktop site, Old Reddit, by shifting its moderator workflows to its new stack and migrating other critical bots. On Reddit's second-quarter earnings calls with investors last week, company executives stressed that one of Reddit's near-term goals was to convert its half-billion weekly active users to daily users through product updates. The company had crushed earnings with revenue of $805 million and earnings per share of $1.25, above estimates, but still saw its stock sink because of what Reddit CEO Steve Huffman described as "choppy" search referral traffic.

Reddit is introducing a new moderator: AI

Reddit is enlisting AI to help moderate new subreddits -- and eventually the rest of site. The company is introducing automated moderation tools that rely on LLMs to help mods manage their communities, and it's expanding who can use those tools today ahead of a full launch later this year. The company calls the suite of tools "Rules Hub," and the tools let mods decide what rules should be automatically enforced and what should happen when a rule is triggered. Rules Hub relies on LLMs to evaluate "whether a post or comment matches the intent of a rule," which "allows Rules Hub to better handle nuance, natural language, and edge cases while preserving moderator control," Reddit says in a blog post. Right now, many subreddits use tools from a feature called Automoderator (aka Automod) to take action on rules, but Automod's tools "depend on exact keyword and pattern matching." Reddit says that Rules Hub has been in testing for "the past few months" with "new and experienced moderators from over 700 communities, including members of Reddit's Mod Council Network." That test of Rules Hub is now expanding to "all newly created communities" and will be "widely available" at some point later in 2026. Rules Hub will be optional for new communities, spokesperson Rosa Kim tells The Verge. However, it does sound as if Reddit plans to retire Automod's enforcement features down the line: In its post, Reddit says that "Looking ahead, we believe Rules Hub, together with newer systems like Post & Comment Guidance and Safety Filters, can eventually replace many of the enforcement workflows that communities rely on from Automod," Reddit says in its post. The updated mod tools are just one of a few big platform announcements Reddit is making on Wednesday. The company is also planning big changes that will affect developers: It's going to require new third-party apps to use the developer platform instead of the API. "We envision a future where all good, trusted automation on Reddit runs within an ecosystem that allows us to offer support and enforce our policies consistently," Reddit says. "To achieve this, we will continue supporting limited public API access, but we will gradually restrict new requests and require third-party apps to transition to and operate on Reddit's Developer Platform." The shift follows Reddit's major API changes in 2023 that it put in place to get AI companies to pony up for Reddit's data but also caused widespread backlash in part because they forced many beloved Reddit apps to shut down. (Currently, if a developer wants to make a Reddit mobile app, they have to get permission from Reddit to get public API exemptions, and that will continue to be the case, Kim says.) Reddit doesn't have a "set timeline" yet for requiring the developer platform, but the company will give "give the community ample notice" and provide a clear timeline, Kim says. The upcoming change will affect "all API apps except the ones we explicitly grant exceptions to," according to Kim. Reddit is also saying today that it's planning more changes to old Reddit as part of its ongoing efforts to fight unauthorized scraping of its content. Those efforts already include blocking Reddit results from search engines that don't pay, suing Anthropic and Perplexity, and blocking the Internet Archive to stop AI companies from using it to scrape data, and in June, the company announced that people would have to be logged in if they wanted to use the old Reddit interface. Reddit doesn't specify what the changes to old Reddit will be, but Kim says the company is "exploring different options" and notes that "in the short term we will limit access to logged-in users and migrate critical bots and moderator workflows."

Old Reddit could be the next casualty of Reddit's war on AI scraping - Engadget

Old Reddit, the 21-year-old desktop version of the site still preferred by many longtime users and moderators, could become the next casualty of Reddit's war against AI scraping. The company is warning users that it plans to make unspecified "changes" to the legacy experience. In a blog post, the company said that changes are necessary "in order to protect our platform, business, and users from abusive scraping and spamming." Mysteriously, the company doesn't indicate exactly what changes it has planned, though it says it will "work on migrating critical bots and moderator workflows to our modern stack." Reddit said at the end of June that it would block access to Old Reddit if users aren't logged in. "Old Reddit's logged-out experience is a significant source of abusive scraping and automated traffic on the platform," Reddit admin boat-botany shared at the time. So far, it seems that this particular change hasn't fully gone into effect. At the time of this writing, I was able to access Old Reddit without being logged in, but was later met with a message that it has been "blocked by network security." A Reddit spokesperson said the change is happening "gradually." While Reddit doesn't indicate what its long-term plans for Old Reddit might entail, the fact that it's trying to move bots and moderation infrastructure away from it, is sure to raise questions about how long the company will continue to support the older version of its site. The company has already hinted at the possibility Old Reddit could go away. In a comment on the post from boat-botany last month, the Reddit admin wrote that "we can't promise it will be around forever." When asked by Engadget if the company was planning to shut down Old Reddit entirely, a spokesperson for the company didn't answer directly. She said that the company is "exploring different options" for Old Reddit. "We don't have a hard timeline right now, but we will work directly with the mods, developers, and communities that depend on our systems and make sure to keep everyone updated," she said. Reddit has taken increasingly aggressive measures to fight AI scraping and unauthorized use of its data. In 2023, the company began charging for access to its API, citing concerns that its data was being used to train large language models. That change effectively killed third-party Reddit clients which prompted a site-wide protest. Now, Reddit says it will begin to phase out its API entirely. The company will "continue supporting limited public API access" but "will gradually restrict new requests and require third-party apps to transition to and operate on Reddit's Developer Platform." Reddit's Developer Platform, also known as Devit, lets developers build bots and other experiences on top of Reddit but is more tightly controlled than its API. The company has already been offering incentives, including a $1 million "app migration program," to get developers to make the switch. Now, it's clear that developers won't have a choice. It's not clear whether Reddit will continue to offer API access to select researchers. The company also shared that it's overhauling its moderation infrastructure. Reddit's expanding tests of its LLM-based moderation system, Rules Hub, which allows subreddit moderators to control how rules are enforced. According to Reddit, Rules Hub is an improvement over the longtime AutoMod system because it's able to "to better handle nuance, natural language, and edge cases" since it can interpret the "intent of a rule" rather than relying on keyword matching. A Reddit spokesperson said the company's goal is for Rules Hub "to eventually replace the AutoMod enforcement capabilities" but that "all other aspects of AutoMod will remain."

Reddit is letting AI decide when your post breaks the rules

The optional tool is rolling out more widely later in 2026, following testing in over 700 communities. Reddit moderation has never exactly been a polished operation. It runs on volunteer moderators, user reports, and Automod rules that may have been written years ago by someone who has since vanished from the subreddit. Perhaps inevitably, AI is now also being invited behind the scenes at Reddit, with a new system that can decide whether posts and comments should be reported or removed. As The Verge reports, Reddit's new Rules Hub uses large language models to judge whether content matches the "intent" of a subreddit rule. Automod usually looks for specific words, phrases, or patterns, while the new system is meant to understand context and handle messier cases that don't fit neatly into a keyword filter. Moderators will still write the rules and decide what happens when one is broken, but Rules Hub can be configured to send content to the mod queue, filter it, or remove it automatically. Mods can also test rules on older posts before switching them on and inspect logs to see why the system took action. That means humans are still technically in charge for now, but it also means an AI could become the first thing to judge whether your post was a joke or an insult. And moderators willing to trust the LLM's judgment can let it junk your posts without human intervention. Reddit says Rules Hub has been tested over the past few months with moderators from more than 700 communities, including members of its Mod Council Network. It's now available for newly created subreddits and is expected to roll out more widely later in 2026. The company also says it isn't ready to replace existing systems in larger or more complicated communities. Reddit believes the Rules Hub AI could eventually take over many of the enforcement jobs currently handled by Automod when combined with tools such as Post and Comment Guidance and Safety Filters. So, human moderators aren't being replaced just yet; the machines are only helping to clear the mod queue. Whether the AI creep stops there remains to be seen.

Reddit is replacing Automod with AI that reads intent, not keywords. Old Reddit's days are numbered.

Reddit plans to replace Automod with LLM-powered Rules Hub, restrict public API access, and eventually phase out Old Reddit. 130M daily users, 100K+ communities. Changes roll out over months. Reddit announced plans to replace core moderation infrastructure that has run the platform for years. The most significant change: Rules Hub, a new moderation system that uses large language models to evaluate whether posts and comments match the intent of a community rule, will eventually replace many of Automod's enforcement workflows. Unlike Automod, which relies on exact keyword and pattern matching, Rules Hub can handle nuance, natural language, and edge cases. It has been testing in over 700 communities and will now be available to all newly created ones. The platform is also restricting public API access further. Third-party apps must transition to Reddit's Developer Platform, and new API requests will be gradually restricted. Reddit launched a $1 million migration programme to help developers move. This follows the 2023 API pricing changes that killed popular third-party apps like Apollo and triggered a site-wide protest. The new restrictions complete that transition: all trusted automation will eventually run within Reddit's own ecosystem. Old Reddit, the 21-year-old legacy desktop interface, will face "complex follow-up steps" beyond the current login requirement. Reddit framed the changes as anti-scraping measures, but the language signals that Old Reddit's unrestricted access is ending. Google replaced its traditional search with AI summaries and faced a backlash from users who preferred the old version. Reddit is making the same kind of forced migration, replacing a system users chose with one the platform controls. Reddit now has over 130 million daily visitors across 100,000+ communities. The LLM-powered moderation is the most technically interesting change: if Rules Hub works as described, moderators set rules in plain language and the AI enforces them contextually, reducing the regex-writing and keyword-list maintenance that Automod required. Wharton researchers found people accept AI outputs 80% of the time, and the question for Reddit is whether moderators will trust an LLM to interpret their rules correctly, or whether AI-powered moderation creates a new class of false positives that are harder to understand and appeal than a keyword match.

Old Reddit a threat to AI data scraping, says platform, with changes coming

When Reddit significantly changed its user interface way back in 2018, there were widespread protests from those who preferred the original. The company has retained access to this at old.reddit.com, and last year promised this version would continue to exist for as long as people kept using it. That promise may now be under some degree of threat as Reddit says that it "plans to make changes" to Old Reddit in order to protect against AI data scraping ... Upcoming changes to Old Reddit Reddit already made a big change to help fight AI when it started introducing account verification procedures. But the company now says it needs to do more, and that this will involve changes to Old Reddit. In order to protect our platform, business, and users from abusive scraping and spamming, over time we plan to make changes involving Old Reddit, the legacy desktop web experience for Reddit that was built 21 years ago. The news post is brief and vague, stating that the first change we'll see is a requirement to be logged-in while using it, and hinting at moderators being required to use the new AI. In the short term, we will continue to require users to be logged in to access it and will work on migrating critical bots and moderator workflows to our modern stack. Beyond this, however, we don't know what else may be in store for those who persist in using the older UI. CEO Steve Huffman promised last year that Old Reddit wasn't going away, but how much of it will survive remains to be seen. AI moderation tools expanding Reddit has also announced that more AI moderation tools will be used to help fight spam, abuse and rule breaking as it expands tests of its automated Rules Hub. We're expanding our test of Rules Hub, a suite of new moderation tools. With Rules Hub, moderators will be able to choose which rules should be automatically enforced, decide what happens when a rule is triggered (send to queue, filter, or remove), preview the experience before enabling it, and review logs and insights to understand how community rules are performing. The platform says this approach is likely to be more effective than older auto-moderation tools that rely on exact keyword matching.

Reddit is ramping up its AI moderation tools. Moderators aren't happy.

Credit: Thomas Fuller / SOPA Images / LightRocket via Getty Images Reddit is making changes to its moderation tools, launching its AI-powered Rules Hub to all new subreddits. Moderators are not thrilled. Announced in a blog post on Wednesday, Reddit is expanding testing of its Rules Hub AI moderation tools to all newly created subreddits. Powered by large language models, Rules Hub has already been tested across more than 700 subreddits, with the company planning to make it widely available across Reddit later in the year. Significantly, Reddit states that while Rules Hub isn't a replacement for human moderation, it and other systems could eventually replace Automoderator (aka Automod). Integrated into Reddit since 2015, Automod is a bot that helps moderators automate various tasks such as blocking specific keywords or removing probable spam. "Unlike Automod's enforcement tools, which depend on exact keyword and pattern matching, Rules Hub uses LLMs to evaluate whether a post or comment matches the intent of a rule," Reddit states. "That allows Rules Hub to better handle nuance, natural language, and edge cases while preserving moderator control." Expanding on this in a post to the r/modnews subreddit, Reddit admin u/Go_JasonWaterfalls offered the example of "distinguishing between an actual insult and a user quoting a movie or using casual slang." (u/Go_JasonWaterfalls has previously identified themselves as Reddit's VP of Community, a title currently held by Laura Nester.) "Our goal isn't to force every moderation workflow into an LLM," said u/Go_JasonWaterfalls. "We're building a broader toolkit (including Rules Hub, Automations, Post & Comment Guidance, some we haven't thought of yet) to support both intent-based and deterministic workflows. And we want to put all of that into a central place (i.e. a hub). This future is still far away. But it's the future we're building toward." We asked you to predict what Apple will do next. See the results and find out how to get a shot at winning an Apple Watch! Moderators aren't happy with Reddit's plan to sunset Automod Despite such assertions, Reddit's moderators remain unconvinced. Many reacted to Wednesday's news with alarm, baulking at Rules Hub's introduction and demanding that Automod remain. "Oh hell nah. We use automod HEAVILY in all of our communities," r/Animesuggest and r/attackontitan mod u/DustyAsh69 commented (emphasis original). "PLEASE stop 'fixing' things that don't need to be fixed." "Automod is load baring [sic], are you seriously sunsetting automod?" wrote r/piercing and r/bodymods mod u/SampleOfNone. "I'm in the Rules Hub beta, it doesn't even come close to doing what automod can. One of my sub has 8 rules, Rules Hub can only enforce 2.... I love automations, I really do, but it's for guiding the good eggs. I doesn't [sic] stand a chance against the bad eggs." In response to moderators' concerns, u/Go_JasonWaterfalls conceded that Rules Hub is "not even close" to being able to replace Automod at present, as it doesn't have all the same functionality. Automod will remain in place for now, and nothing is set to change in the immediate future. Even so, improvement of and eventual migration to Rules Hub remains Reddit's end goal, with u/Go_JasonWaterfalls attempting to reassure mods that the platform "won't sunset anything until it works for good and bad eggs alike." "I don't think you're hearing your moderators," replied r/freesofware mod u/happyxpenguin. "They're telling you DO NOT SUNSET automod. Period." Reddit has had a rocky relationship with its unpaid moderators in recent years. In 2023, CEO Steve Huffman likened them to "landed gentry", earning widespread ire from many mods who felt their hard work was being taken for granted. Moderators guide subreddits, which includes setting and enforcing rules, deleting spam or off-topic posts, and acting on reports. This occurred amidst moderator-led protests against Reddit's widely derided decision to begin charging developers for access to its application programming interface (API), which had been free since its introduction. In response to these protests, Reddit threatened to remove mods unless they backed down. Unsurprisingly, the company's subsequent attempts to make nice were met with disbelief and derision. Judging from reactions to this week's news, moderators' faith in the company appears to remain on shaky ground. (Reddit stated on Wednesday that it will gradually restrict new requests for access to its API, and require third-party apps to migrate to its Developer Platform.) Reddit to also tackle "abusive" scraping of users' data In addition to rolling out Rules Hub more broadly, Reddit further announced that it will be making more changes to prevent "abusive" scraping of users' data. However, this doesn't mean users' posts won't be used to train AI at all. Though Reddit barred search engines from crawling its platform for free in 2024, it also struck $60 million deals allowing Google and OpenAI to use redditors' data to train their AI algorithms. Reddit also stated that it will make changes intended to encourage new users and help them make successful posts. Currently, some subreddits remove comments and posts from new accounts, or from ones that haven't accumulated many upvotes across their various contributions (a function that Automod is capable of executing). Though this system counters issues such as spam or people creating new accounts to evade bans, Reddit states that it also presents an obstacle to new users attempting to join a subreddit for the first time. As such, the platform is looking at implementing alternative solutions. "Over time, our goal is to improve Reddit's systems and moderation tools so communities can rely less on things like karma and account age, which prevent many first time users from successfully posting in a community, and more on stronger abuse prevention built into the systems they use," Reddit's blog post states. Exactly how Reddit intends to do this is unclear, but it seems likely that AI will be involved. Want more tech and digital culture news delivered to your inbox daily or sent straight to your device? Sign up for Mashable's Top Stories newsletter or get Mashable push alerts today.

Reddit Finally Found a Way to Make Its Mods Even Worse: Replace Them With AI

Can't-miss innovations from the bleeding edge of science and tech Reddit has long heavily relied on moderators, a team of volunteers working without pay to keep Reddit communities free of abuse and other nefarious content -- with extremely varying degrees of success, earning them a certain reputation. As AI automation continues to come for our jobs, soon even Reddit mods could be made redundant by the tech. As The Verge reports, Reddit is now deploying AI bots to help moderate new subreddits. The suite of new automated moderation tools, dubbed "Rules Hub," leverages the power of large language models to enforce rules set by human users, as detailed in a new blog post. The company says that by introducing AI mods, it could help keep AI spam at bay. "We believe these changes will make Reddit more accessible, straightforward, and human while maintaining what makes the platform special," the company wrote. The word "human" certainly does a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence. But whether AI bots fighting a barrage of other bots will ultimately improve the situation as the internet drowns in AI slop remains to be seen. Reddit, one of the last -- and far from perfect -- bastions of human-generated content on the web, has been under siege for years now, in a tragic mess that the company may not be able to AI itself out of. Reddit hopes that its new tools will eventually be able to "replace many of the enforcement workflows that communities rely on from Automod," or Automoderator, an existing moderation tool that has long been a thorn in the sides of users. Its AI mod bots will have a key advantage over Automod, if Reddit is to be believed. "Unlike Automod's enforcement tools, which depend on exact keyword and pattern matching, Rules Hub uses LLMs to evaluate whether a post or comment matches the intent of a rule," the company explained. "That allows Rules Hub to better handle nuance, natural language, and edge cases while preserving moderator control." But whether these new changes will be able to fix Reddit users' already strained relationship with mods remains unclear at best. Reactions to the news were mixed on the platform, to say the least, with some questioning whether the company is looking to fight fire with fire. "As someone who moderates a small regional hip hop/rap subreddit that constantly has lyrics as comments, I do not expect this to work well with that kind of content," one user wrote. "There's a ton of stuff I already have to fish out of the filter because it's "violent" or whatever and it's just a song title or lyric. I doubt AI will be able to grasp the nuance of the lyrics of someone like Lee Scott or Jam Baxter." It's a particularly contentious subject as Reddit continues to be overrun by AI slop and bot spam years after trying to force AI companies to pay to access Reddit data. At the time, new API restrictions triggered an outright rebellion by users. "Before long, Reddit will be mostly AI bot accounts, moderated by AI bots, discussing mostly AI generated slop," one disillusioned user wrote. "I genuinely don't know if the fun parts of the internet are going to be usable 5-10 years from now if this continues."