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Ask HN: Do I need content moderation on day 1 for a Reddit type site?

2 points by hypnoscripto ↗ HN
What's your experience with illegal content on a link sharing site you've made? In your experience is it something to worry about hiring someone for before 100, 1000, 10000 users? Just had a simple idea I wanted to throw together, but realized this may be an issue even with a hobby site.

6 comments

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pasttense01
In the early days you can do the content moderation yourself, just like you will probably do almost everything else.
rawtxapp
Those kind of sites have the notorious chicken and egg problem and are pretty hard to grow. So just a simple manual moderation a few times a day should be good enough, Google won't index you very quickly anyways.
muzani
I've done multiple projects. I find that the pornography and spam comes in at the 1000 user line.

You don't need active moderation up to around 10000 users, but you should have code that handles blocking by Day 1.

There's a discord game out there where someone tries to put in random strings in a link sharing site and see who gets to interesting content the fastest. I'd say the NSFW content is is 1 in a hundred, but this is anectodal data. Actual illegal content would probably have been taken down earlier, but enough of it slips through things like MEGA that the FBI probably won't hunt you down for it.

ecesena
Same experience. I think at the beginning you need the opposite, i.e. either you/your team/your friends to kick off a lot of content or it'll hardly take off.

It also depends on your site. For example if you display content in chronological order like Twitter, then you incentivize people to spam as their content is immediately visible. I.e. my first post will likely be "test" - if I see it in the homepage then I delete it and post a link to any of my projects (if not worse).

Finally, moderation shouldn't be massively complex at the beginning. Just implement a super downvote (that maybe only you/your friends can see) that kills content you don't want to see with 1 click.

Good luck, looking forward to a show hn!

hypnoscripto
Related question: is it legal to rehost another site’s links ?

My idea is basically a Reddit-but…

So it would work great with the same exact content as Reddit itself.

codingclaws
I recently launched a Reddit clone and I'd say about 10% of sign-ups are from troublemakers. However, I haven't told many people about the site, it's text only, and it uses an uncommon moderation system (whitelists). Here is the project if you are curious:

https://www.peachesnstink.com