Automoderator was really introduced to reduce loads on moderators. As such, how strict the filters were was mainly down to them.

The reason many moderators used it was to reduce spam from brand new accounts/sock puppets and to enforce community-defined posting rules. On the sub I co-ran, you only needed +5 comment karma in order to be allowed to post.

Eh, if you ever saw behind the scenes how much bullshit making an account wait a few days prevented, you might think different. Adding a karma limit could cut it down even more.

What made that necessary in the first place was bots. Fake accounts spamming shit, scamming, or manipulating via misinformation. Even on fairly small subs, you could get hammered a few times a week. Without automod, all of that shit was staying up until a mod could notice reports or otherwise find out, then they’d have to go back and remove shit. Automod cut the bullshit down to a bare minimum.

It sucked for new accounts, but the truth is that new users on new accounts don’t really contribute shit anyway. Nobody had enough sense to hang back a few days and get the vibe of a sub (much less reading the damn rules) before jumping in. A time limit fixes that too, and you end up not only giving those users time to figure things out, but the serious idiots would piss and moan about it, then get nasty when they weren’t given an exception, showing what kind of person they are (not the kind that contributes to a friendly, interesting conversation).

Now, some of the extremely nitpicky automod rules could be annoying even for long term users, especially when mod/s didn’t bother to include rules explaining about how to format posts to meet sub criteria.

And, it is important to note that automod rules were written by someone for a sub. There are certainly copy/paste pieces to make things like filtering out bigots easier to set up, but even copy pasting multiple rules takes time and effort to do, then verify that they’re working. So they’re in place per sub, and reddit didn’t interfere with that. They do now, or that’s the word I’ve heard, that autmod settings have been changed without consulting mods at all. But back before their stupidity, admins were hands off for the most part.

Frankly, if lemmy gets much bigger, the lack of basic automated tools is going to be a problem. There’s already bots here, some scammers, and more spam than there was a year ago. With US elections ramping up, I’m seeing some suspicious posts that look like the same kind of faked accounts that engaged in manipulation on reddit.

I never really ran into that even as a new user, but that might be because I never went to the garbage big subs, all of my faves were relatively small.

Full disclosure: I do still use Reddit, simply because of how much content there is on that site. But I’m tapering off to spend more time on Lemmy. I hope to see this platform grow.

If I had to boil down my description of Reddit into one thing, it would be “passive aggressive.”

I’ve been banned from subs I’ve never even previously commented/posted to. But then I’ll make a comment and it’s been shadowbanned. It’s so prevalent that I got in the habit of logging out to check that it actually appeared. I mostly stuck to commenting and made new posts rather infrequently, but it seems like some subs no matter what I posted it would get removed for very dubious reasons. One of the worst offenders was the sub for unpopular opinions, where they would just remove anything and say “must be an unpopular opinion.”

This would not surprise me. I started a new account recently and was baffled at how hard it was to get onto certain subs. It was mostly the medium sized subs. They don’t even say how long a new account has to be active or what the karma threshold is.