Modernizing Reddit’s Infrastructure and Moderation Tools

Today, Reddit operates at a scale we couldn't have imagined when Reddit was built 21 years ago. Every day, more than 130 million people visit Reddit, connect in over 100,000 communities, and submit millions of posts and comments.

As our platform has grown and the internet around us has changed dramatically, we need to modernize and strengthen certain legacy systems to meet the rising expectations of all Reddit users, mods, and developers.

In the coming months, we will be investing in Reddit's infrastructure in order to:

• Make starting and moderating a community easier than it is today.
• Help people discover and participate in communities more easily.
• Provide developers more capabilities to build tools on Reddit's Developer Platform.
• Better protect Reddit from scraping and abuse while preserving what makes it uniquely human.

We believe these changes will make Reddit more accessible, straightforward, and human while maintaining what makes the platform special.

This transition will take time - we're not replacing any systems today. We're sharing this with our community early so that the people who use these legacy systems can help shape what comes next and ensure these changes make Reddit better for everyone.

Making Moderation EasierAs mod teams become more global, more mobile, and more varied in experience, our long-term plan is to build tools that make moderation easier and faster. We're reshaping our tools so mods can spend less time dealing with spam, abuse, and generic rule-breaking, and more time shaping the culture, norms, and identity of their communities.

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. For the past few months, Rules Hub has been in an early test with new and experienced moderators from over 700 communities, including members of Reddit's Mod Council Network. Now, all newly created communities will be able to test the tool before it becomes widely available later this year.

We also recently expanded the capabilities of Post & Comment Guidance, a tool used by thousands of mods to help users better understand community expectations. Earlier this year, we added support for Post Flair Guidance, which helps users choose the right flair, and Top Comment Check, which provides guidance on top-level comments and reduces repetitive moderation work.

Looking ahead, we believe Rules Hub, together with newer systems likePost & Comment Guidance and Safety Filters, can eventually replace many of the enforcement workflows that communities rely on from Automod. 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. That allows Rules Hub to better handle nuance, natural language, and edge cases while preserving moderator control.

Helping More People Discover and Contribute to Communities

We want new users around the world to be able to easily find relevant communities, understand their rules and norms, and make useful contributions. Today, new users can encounter invisible barriers like account age and karma thresholds, unclear removals, and poor community discovery.

Those safeguards exist for good reasons, including preventing spam, brigading, and ban evasion. 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. This will make it easier for genuine new users to participate and easier for mods to welcome them with confidence.

Building a Sustainable Future for Reddit's Developer Platform

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. 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.

Over the past several months, we've been working closely with developers and moderators to gain a deeper understanding of their requirements for migrating their bots and applications to the Developer Platform. We've also launched a $1 Million App Migration Program to support developers through this transition and are working directly with some of the top app developers on the platform today. Based on those conversations, we've already expanded the Developer Platform's capabilities in areas like new plugins and APIs. We will continue to work with moderators and developers on this long-term transition in order to build more secure solutions while preserving the tools and workflows.

Protecting Reddit from Data Scraping and Spamming

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. 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. These efforts will help us mitigate the bad behavior and give us time to plan the complex follow-up steps.

These changes will strengthen Reddit's foundation, ensure the platform is ready to support thriving communities for future generations, and preserve what makes Reddit uniquely human.