Reddit has announced a set of infrastructure and moderation changes aimed at lowering the barriers new users face when joining its communities, including reducing reliance on "karma" scores and account-age thresholds. These metrics were originally designed to filter out spam and bad actors, but the company says they have increasingly made it harder for genuine newcomers to participate, so it is shifting more of that responsibility onto built-in, automated abuse-prevention systems instead.

Central to the update is an expansion of Reddit's AI-powered Rules Hub, which uses large language models to judge whether posts or comments align with a community's rules, capturing nuance and context that stricter automated filters might miss. Previously tested by more than 700 communities, the tool is now open to all new communities and will roll out widely to existing ones later this year; Reddit is also improving tools that explain community rules to posters and help users set flair, and updating moderator workflows on its Old Reddit desktop site. The changes follow last week's second-quarter earnings, where Reddit reported revenue of $805 million and earnings per share of $1.25, beating estimates, though its stock fell after CEO Steve Huffman cited "choppy" search referral traffic; executives had also flagged converting its 500 million weekly active users into daily users as a key near-term goal.