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Inspiration
Moderating a Reddit community means reading hundreds of posts daily, catching subtle hostility, decoding internet slang, and writing fair warnings, all while keeping up with endless new content. Moderators burn out. Communities suffer. I wanted to give moderators superpowers; understand any post instantly without reading every word.
What it does
ModLens-AI lives in Reddit's mod actions menu bar. Click the shield on any post or comment, and it analyzes content using Google Gemini AI. You get a concise summary, a hostility score, slang detection with definitions, and flagged aggressive comments. For comment threads, it summarizes replies too. Then take action with one click: approve, remove with AI-generated warning, or remove silently. Everything supports English, Spanish, French, and Portuguese.
How we built it
I used Reddit's Devvit platform with React and TypeScript for the frontend, Hono for the backend, and Google Gemini for AI analysis. With the help of AI, I built caching to reduce API costs, analytics to track usage patterns, and batch moderation for handling multiple items. The UI is responsive and dark-themed to match Reddit's native feel. Fallback systems ensure everything works even without AI connectivity.
Challenges we ran into
Session management across Reddit's serverless architecture was brutal. Our moderation actions kept failing because server instances lost data between requests. We eventually bypassed server memory entirely, passing context directly in API calls. Fine-tuning AI prompts to return consistent JSON took countless iterations. And getting the Windows development environment stable with port conflicts tested our patience more than any code problem.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
Having a functional app is a great achievement for me since I started this not knowing very much about its feasibility.
What we learned
As a frontend developer, I was forced to learn many backend concepts such as serverless architecture, API integration with AI models, caching strategies. This was a rough ride
What's next for ModLens-AI
The application is not yet fully functional, that is not all languages are fully integrated yet. When that is done, batch processing would be the next phase, automatically approving or deleting post or comments with certain hostility scores set by the moderator
