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.
