GoodCitizen has been built on Reddit’s Developer Platform using Devvit and submitted for public listing review with npx devvit publish --public as version 0.0.7. Since the app creates custom posts, Reddit requires manual review before it becomes publicly installable. A demo video, GitHub repository, and app listing link are provided for judging.
Inspiration
Moderating a Reddit community is not just about removing bad content. Good moderators also need to recognize helpful members, encourage positive participation, and make fast decisions when the mod queue gets crowded. In many communities, moderators repeatedly check a user’s history, past removals, helpful comments, and behavior patterns before deciding whether to approve, remove, or review content more carefully.
That process takes time, especially in active subreddits where many posts and comments arrive every day. We wanted to build a tool that helps moderators make better decisions faster, without replacing human judgment.
That idea became GoodCitizen: Trust Signals for Mods — a Devvit-powered moderation tool that turns community behavior into clear trust signals.
What it does
GoodCitizen helps Reddit moderators understand user reliability at a glance. Instead of only looking at karma or account age, the app builds a more meaningful Trust Score based on helpful actions, positive signals, infraction history, and moderation outcomes.
The project includes:
- Trust Score System: Each user receives a trust score from 0 to 100 based on positive and negative community behavior.
- Helpfulness Rewards: Moderators can reward users who provide useful answers, support others, or improve community discussion.
- Infraction History: Warnings, removals, spam behavior, and rule violations reduce trust score and help moderators identify risky patterns.
- Mod Queue Priority Signals: The app surfaces quick badges such as “High Trust,” “Medium Trust,” or “Low Trust,” helping mods prioritize queue decisions.
- Anti-Farming Protection: Daily earning caps and mod-to-user reward limits reduce reputation farming and prevent abuse.
- Community Health Report: Mods can view positive interaction trends, helpful contributors, repeat violations, and overall community health.
- Subreddit Presets: Different communities can customize terminology, rewards, and milestones. For example, a learning subreddit may use “Mentor Points,” while a finance subreddit may use “Trusted Advice Points.”
The goal is simple: help moderators spend less time manually checking user history and more time building healthy communities.
How we built it
GoodCitizen was built using Reddit’s Developer Platform, Devvit, along with a modern dashboard experience using Hono, React, TypeScript, and Redis.
The backend handles moderation logic, trust calculations, reward validation, anti-abuse checks, and event-based automation. Redis is used to store user stats, point events, trust score data, configuration settings, audit logs, and community health metrics.
The frontend is a custom WebView dashboard built with React. It gives moderators a clean interface to view leaderboards, user profiles, trust meters, farming status, mod tools, presets, queue simulations, and audit history.
GoodCitizen also uses Devvit triggers and moderator actions. For example:
- On app installation, default settings are initialized.
- On comment activity, helpful behavior can be detected and rewarded.
- Moderators can manually award points from the mod menu.
- User milestones can update flair and send recognition messages.
- Scheduled jobs can support weekly reports and periodic resets.
The architecture was designed to be modular. Shared TypeScript interfaces keep the client and server consistent, while separate backend modules handle Redis operations, milestones, anti-abuse logic, triggers, forms, menus, and scheduled tasks.
Challenges we faced
One of the biggest challenges was designing a trust system that feels useful but not unfair. A simple points leaderboard can be easily abused, so we needed a more balanced model. That is why GoodCitizen includes both positive signals and negative signals. Helpful users can grow their reputation, but repeated rule violations, removals, or spam patterns reduce trust.
Another challenge was anti-farming. If reputation points are rewarded without limits, users may try to game the system. To solve this, we added daily point caps and mod-to-user limits so that trust cannot be inflated too quickly or through repeated rewards from the same source.
We also had to think carefully about moderator experience. A powerful tool is not useful if it is difficult to understand. So we focused on making the dashboard visual, clear, and easy to scan. Trust meters, badges, queue signals, and health cards are designed to show the right information quickly.
Finally, we wanted GoodCitizen to work for different types of communities. A programming subreddit, finance subreddit, a fitness subreddit, and support subreddit may all define “helpfulness” differently. Subreddit presets were added so the tool can adapt to different community cultures instead of forcing one fixed reward system.
What we learned
While building GoodCitizen, we learned that moderation tools should not only punish bad behavior. The best community tools also encourage good behavior. A healthy subreddit needs both enforcement and recognition.
We also learned that “trust” is more useful when it is explainable. Moderators should not just see a number; they should understand why that number exists. That is why GoodCitizen shows helpfulness rewards, positive signals, infraction history, account context, and anti-farming status alongside the trust score.
Another important lesson was that automation should support moderators, not replace them. GoodCitizen does not make final moderation decisions automatically. Instead, it gives moderators better context so they can make faster and more informed choices.
Impact
GoodCitizen can be useful for many Reddit communities, especially subreddits with active discussions, advice, learning, support, finance, health, gaming, or local community topics.
For moderators, the app can reduce repeated manual profile checking by surfacing user trust signals directly in the moderation workflow. For users, it creates a positive incentive to be helpful, respectful, and consistent. For communities, it helps reward good contributors while making rule-breaking patterns easier to identify.
Examples of communities that could benefit include:
- r/learnprogramming: Reward users who consistently explain concepts and help beginners.
- r/personalfinance: Highlight trusted advice contributors and reduce risky or misleading responses.
- r/loseit: Encourage supportive, motivating, and helpful community members.
What’s next
Future improvements for GoodCitizen include deeper queue integration, more advanced community health analytics, better preset customization, stronger abuse detection, configurable trust formulas, and richer moderator reports.
We also want to add more transparent user-facing explanations so community members understand how to improve their trust score through positive participation.
GoodCitizen is built around one core belief: strong communities are not created only by removing bad content. They are built by recognizing good citizens.
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