Would it be helpful to have AutoModerator respond to every new thread with a post of the standard disclaimer about the quality rules?
It might alleviate some of the human moderators' workload if it gave people more of a heads up before they posted a joke, a low-effort wiki link, etc. I think posters from outside a community don't always make it a habit to read the sidebar before posting.
It seems inevitable that once a post rises above a threshold of attention that one mod or another will end up posting the disclaimer anyway.
Hi there. This is something we have considered before, but rejected for a few reasons. I treat it much more in-depth here, but the sum of it is that there are two main reasons. First, very few threads need it. Sometimes no threads do, sometimes one thread does in a day. It is very rare we find ourselves deploying the top level warning in two threads in a day. With 120+ submissions daily, this is less than one percent of threads. So we don't see much utility in putting a warning in all threads when few actually need it. Right now we only drop it in threads that are active, so likely hitting /r/all and/or frontpages, thus getting a lot of non-regulars.
Secondly, as discussed in that link, having an Automod post makes people think that they can respond to that post with the non-rules breaking stuff. People already do when it is done by a mod. We are very much against having a 'quarantined space' where the rules are loosened, and having an automod post of that type would de facto turn into one and likely increase our workload rather than decrease.