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

Question

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.

muzani · Accepted Answer

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.

rawtxapp · Answer

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.

codingclaws · Answer

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

pasttense01 · Answer

In the early days you can do the content moderation yourself, just like you will probably do almost everything else.