AutoModerator

AutoModerator is Reddit’s built-in moderation bot. Every subreddit gets it at no cost, and each moderator team decides what it does. The configuration lives on a wiki page inside the community itself, written in YAML, where every rule pairs a set of conditions with an action to take when they match. Once saved, those rules run against each new post and comment the moment it is submitted, around the clock, with no human in the loop.

What it commonly filters

A handful of conditions account for most AutoModerator rules in the wild. Minimum account age and minimum karma are the classic pair, used to keep throwaway accounts out of a community’s threads. Beyond those, rules frequently match links against allowed or blocked domains, scan titles and bodies for banned phrases, and require a verified email or a minimum body length. The actions are just as varied. A rule can remove content outright, hold it for human review, report it to the moderation queue, post an automatic reply, or assign flair. Because each community writes its own configuration, an identical comment can publish cleanly in one subreddit and disappear instantly in the next.

For operators

When a new account’s post vanishes with no explanation, the cause is almost always an AutoModerator rule rather than a human moderator who read it and objected. Age and karma floors are precisely the gates a fresh account fails by definition, and many configurations remove silently, so the post still looks live from the author’s logged-in view while nobody else ever sees it. The failure is mechanical, and it is local: it reflects one community’s settings, not Reddit’s judgment of the account. That makes it a different problem from a Reddit shadowban, the sitewide version of the same silence, which hides an account everywhere at once. The durable answer to both is identical. An account with months of ordinary history stops tripping these gates for the simple reason that the gates were never aimed at it. Building that kind of history, patiently and without shortcuts, is what the guide to Reddit marketing for founders is about.