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.