Towards a Better Modqueue: Designing for Diversity Across Moderator Objectives and Workflows

Abstract

Reddit relies on volunteer moderators to enforce community rules, configure tools, and review flagged content. This labor is substantial, worth millions in unpaid effort, and increasingly hard to sustain as communities grow. While recent updates to Reddit's modqueue emphasize efficiency and reducing redundancy, recent research shows that moderators use the interface in varied ways, value objectives beyond throughput (such as fairness and accuracy), and often resist features that disrupt workflows. In this paper, we survey 106 active Reddit moderators to examine the objectives they bring to their modqueue work and the kinds of interventions they consider helpful. Our findings highlight wide variation in values and workflows, with no single objective beyond accuracy dominating, and different perspectives on which interventions are useful. To address this diversity, we introduce a simulation-based approach that can complement empirical findings by probing tradeoffs and testing potential interventions, and provide design recommendations based on our findings.