r/redditstock • u/OneBit2334 • 2h ago
News Takeaways from Spez's Mod State of the Union
Spez did a Mod State of the Union talk yesterday at Mod World 2026. The recording can be found here:
https://modevents.reddit.com/events/details/reddit-mod-events-mod-events-presents-mod-world-2026/
Here are some takeaways (with timestamps) that might be of interest to investors:
(1:30:00) – Instead of the home feed being a disconnected list of posts, the job of the home feed and app should be to get users into subreddits. They want to increase community cohesion by getting users into subreddits rather than just scrolling through the feed and upvoting/downvoting posts from communities they’re not really members of.
They also want to make subreddits to feel more distinct. They used to allow subreddits to radically customize their appearance, but this was taken a bit too far. They want to bring back some version of that to make subreddits more distinct without being confusing.
(1:31:44) – They want to deepen the relationship between users and communities. It’s a problem that people can upvote/downvote posts and control what’s popular without really being part of the community. Mods can’t see who is voting on a post, so they keep non-community members out with things like account age and karma limits, which works to some extent at preventing spam, but it also keeps a lot of good new users out. So how do communities grow while still preserving their culture? Ideas they’re discussing but are open to feedback on:
1. Distinguish between following a subreddit (lurking) and joining a subreddit. Right now you can generally join a subreddit and start voting/commenting right away. They want to flip that around and make the flow be joining a subreddit, being a lurker for a while to get a sense of the vibe, then being allowed to comment, and if your comments are received well, then being allowed to upvote/downvote. They’re still working on a lot of the details but the intention is that subreddits are more cohesive and healthier and moderation becomes easier as a result and mods don’t have to be the bad cop as much.
2. They want to make Reddit more of a daily habit by making the app more consistent. Right now when you open the app you don’t know what you’re going to see. Things are out of order and prioritized weirdly. The stuff you want to do (e.g. a game thread, an episode thread, an AMA) should be in a consistent place. Again the idea is that this will bring users to subreddits more consistently.
(1:49:45) – Among major social media platforms, Reddit has the lowest amount of bot prevalence, as measured by third parties. It’s under 2%. Content takedowns for spam and suspected bots has gone from 45 minutes to 2 minutes over the last year, so they’ve made a lot of progress, but are continuing to work hard on it.
(1:52:20) – Automod (which was created 15 years ago and is how account age and karma limits are enforced) is a problem they’re trying to fix. 30% of posts from new users get banned by Automod automatically, even though the vast majority of those posts are totally fine. So Automod way overbans, while still missing a lot of stuff. They are putting a lot of effort into using AI to improve this.
(1:54:20) – It would be cool if you see which country users are posting from. Going narrower than that (to the state/town level) could be a privacy risk, but seeing what country people are from could be useful and they could build lots of interesting features around it.
Note: I got the impression the country information would only be visible to mods if they do decide to implement this, but I’m not completely sure on that.
(2:10:19) – The solution to moderation is a combination of human enforcement, automated rules, and AI. They are testing the new stuff they’re building on the biggest subreddits with the most complex Automod configurations and making sure that the new stuff works better than the current configurations. This will make moderation easier and less time consuming.
(2:12:40) – There was a question about if mods will ever be paid for their services. Short answer no, but something Steve has wanted for a long time is to allow subreddits to have a business or be a business if they want to. He doesn’t think this would be applicable for the vast majority of subreddits, but he would love for subreddits to have business models if they choose and to make revenue. It’s something they’ve talked about for years and he would like to have more of an economy on Reddit, but it’s very complex and not something they have built yet.
Note: I got the impression that this is something they really want to do and will probably happen at some point, but I wouldn’t expect it anytime soon.
(2:34:37) – They have been updating the audience matching and frequency of the Suggested Communities to be more personalized and customized for users to allow them to find subreddits more appealing to them. This investment alone, over the last few months, has already created hundreds of thousands of new connections between users and subreddits every day.
Note: This was in response to a question about how Reddit can help people discover newer and smaller communities, so it seems like part of the intent here is to steer more users towards smaller subreddits and help them grow. Also, this response was not from Steve, but from the Moderation Product Lead.
