Heya mods,

A few weeks ago, some of our mods will have seen changes to the New Reddit mod queue action bar’s Approve and Remove buttons as well as some updates to the mod action menu. We’re excited to share that we’ve just rolled out these updates to all of our mods this week.

We had a few goals in mind when working on these updates:

Goal 1 - Make mod tooling easier to understand and use

Based on data from mods and would-be mods, we know that the mod tools on New Reddit are hard to understand and use. We hope that these changes will open moderation to a broader range of potential mods and make it easier for mod teams to grow and retain new mods.

Ways we think these changes will help:

• By reserving color for communicating the status of the item in the queue, we’ll make the mod queue more scannable and easier to understand.
• By showing actions contextual to the state of the thing in the queue, it’ll be easier to understand what actions I should consider taking.

We remove \"approve\" for approved items, and \"remove\" for removed items.

By separating “status” from the “buttons”, we’ll be able to free up space to surface more relevant information like “who took the action and when” (see above).

• In an effort to keep the number of actions from being overwhelming, we’re being selective of which actions show up by default.

Goal 2 - Ensure the mod queue is efficient and meets the needs of our most active mods

We believe these recent changes will assist mods by accomplishing the following things:

• Better scannability than the existing new reddit mod queue
  • Emphasized [Approve] action provides an anchor as you scan, and consistently distinguishes the action from “remove.”
  • Reserving other colors for the queue item status makes it easier to process items while scanning
• “Add removal reason” is easier to find and closer to the remove action itself.
• For bigger mod teams, being able to immediately see who approved or removed a piece of content can help reduce redundancy and lead to more team collaboration.

As we ran the experiment, we received feedback that the mod action menu on comments was missing (turns out…it never existed 🥲) and that the lock functionality was not consistent between posts and comments. Thanks to your feedback we’ve since made those changes and hope this provides a better experience as you moderate on desktop. Please see below for what this new experience looks like:

https://preview.redd.it/xytq3h76gk0a1.png?width=1366&format=png&auto=webp&s=121bba04a9d21dca835affb8003a3608a77f47cb

https://preview.redd.it/adrm0ko7gk0a1.png?width=1366&format=png&auto=webp&s=fbb8811d8bbda48a48f5fcd04a11ebc1fc5df25a

https://preview.redd.it/cuac9sl8gk0a1.png?width=1366&format=png&auto=webp&s=ad2906dd5c6d259420ce73a9a80163fd7d162a96

As always, we’d love to hear your feedback in the comments below.