How do you handle user-generated content in your apps?

I'm using AWS' presigned URLs to let my users upload directly to an S3 bucket, with a lambda function to generate thumbnails, I keep track of the user's uploads through my app's database. This is as close as I imagine an "affordable API for audio, video, and images".

I would love a "Backblaze of user generated content". The existing players in the market are way too expensive (likely because they run off the cloud cartel and pass along their bandwidth tax). Basic image handling isn't too hard to deal with on your own, but video and audio is a huge pain. The uploading (which needs to be fault tolerant and resumable), encoding (which takes a long time), storage (which is large) and playback (which requires a half-dozen different formats) is all very annoying to deal with. So much so, for my SaaS products, I only allow my users to upload images!

I had the exact same idea as you, and shelled out a few hundred dollars for a domain from a squatter. My prototype basically reinvents fault tolerant resumable uploads (like tus.io). On the backend, it streams the file to Wasabi and Backblaze. That's as far as I got. Video/audio scares me, but I'll get to it eventually.

I really like the content moderation as a service (via AI, or humans) idea that others have mentioned.

    an MVP for a web service called View

Nitpick: if someone types in "user-generated content view" to their favorite search engine, they're not likely to find you.

FYI - the hardest part of user generated media is probably the moderation aspect.

I think you just described https://cloudinary.com/

How do you handle user-generated content in your apps?

Very similar to how I'd handle toxic waste. I'd touch it as little as possible, and ideally I'd like it to be someone else's problem.

The app store has requirements for dealing with user-generated content. The biggest pain points for me isn't with enabling users to upload content but instead with the moderation around it. One user might want to block another user and filter out any content they produce. Or we may need to manually review and delete content that a user has reported. That's the biggest pain point.

The moderation of UGC is something that's killed off a number of my own ideas, at best 'parked' them. CSAM only goes so far, and frankly it's just too reactive - proactive defence is too costly for self-funding early stage startups such as myself.

Building the upload/delivery stream was easy, it's all the 'needless complexity' that adds value. You know, like privacy controls, access control, moderation, image formats and optimised delivery, indexing, search, tagging, etc.

I'll probably reimagine it and find better ways of hosting content but with my vision and UX. Maybe Cloudinary as folk have suggested, maybe some other SaaS DAM product with a solid track record - I doubt I'd trust an early stage MVP if my customers need to rely upon it. Too risky for my tastes.

Now if there was a moderation-as-a-service (MaaS?) that would have uses at the right pricepoint.

A pain point that I'm considering is building a video hosting service but at 0.3x - 0.1x price point of existing ones. Hosting, encoding & streaming video is expensive. The "pennies" that another user mentions add up really fast.

You could sell moderation as additional service, either AI based (cheaper) or employ actual people. Otherwise, developers probably should be ones responsible for moderating media uploaded through their apps.

My "pain point" is a bit earlier in the process:

Auser authentification.

What is everyone using for this? How do you turn a static website where a user can set some configurations (say the color scheme) into a site where the user can log in and save their settings?

In the past I rolled my own solutions. But for new projects I am considering to use a library or framework.

I guess Django, Flask, Laravel, Symfony and Express all come with some default auth mechanism. How is HNs experience? Are you using these? Are you happy with them?

> and noticed first-hand how needlessly complex and expensive existing services are

Can you give some examples?

Out of everything I would consider 'complex', handling media wouldn't even make the top 1,000 and services like AWS mean you can store petabytes for pennies.

Maybe ipfs and p2p is a good tool for this? Escalate through increasing degrees of content sharing and validation, from anonymous on up, and build templates off of existing ipfs hosts that already do moderation?

Storj DCS is a good option for storing and delivering user-generated content. It is globally availble - so you don't need to worry about AZ replication, and it's 1/10th the price of Amazon S3.

We were paying $100,000 a month storing user-generated content, and now are paying about $10,000 a month after migrating

What are you all doing to secure the user content? To ensure the content isn’t exfiled

mux.com (YC backed) is doing stripe for video already. Their API is really to use.