You either die an MVP or live long enough to build content moderation
Noodling at some thoughts on <i>how technology works</i> --- is fundamental mechanisms, not what it <i>is</i> --- I'd come up with a list of eight factors that seemed central.  And then thought for a few days and came up with a ninth:  hygiene.<p>In building <i>any</i> technology, what comes to dominate after a time are the <i>unintended</i> or <i>unwanted</i> consequences.  This is particularly true of any <i>networked</i> system, in which as the network grows, various cost functions emerge and begin to overwhelm the value prospects.<p>I suspect that those cost functions are both relatively constant per node, but also tend to increase over time.  The result is that small networks can grow quickly (the large positive per-node values dominante the costs), but as the node-count rises, marginal value decreases (see Tilly-Odlyzko's refutation of Metcalfe's law:  v = n<i>log(n)), </i>and* the cost functions increase both as bad actors are attracted to the system and as interactions between nominally good-faith actors become increasingly high-friction.<p>The consequence is that a "no-moderation" or "light-moderation" policy works really well, until it suddenly doesn't.<p>This has parallels to other network-based structures, most notably cities.  Without sewage, or crime, or public health, or waste-removal, or pollution-control systems, cities can grow fairly rapidly, up to some maximum viable size.  After that point, not only do already-extant issues become intolerable (or more specifically:  unsurvivable), but new harms co-evolve with the cities themselves to emerge within them.  (See Kyle Harper's <i>The Fate of Rome</i> for a wonderful exploration of this concept.)<p>For online UCG platforms, this presents as various forms of activity that directly attack trust and safety of the platform itself.  Ultimately, growth of the platform is often limited by these effects.<p>Incidentally, a new professional organisation formed last year to address these issues specifically, the TSPA (Trust and Safety Professional Association).  It's still finding its feet, though it's begun organising both a training curriculum and a library of practices and references on the issues, processes, considerations, and legal factors involved.<p><a href="https://www.tspa.info/2020/06/17/new-organizations-dedicated-to-online-trust-and-safety/" rel="nofollow">https://www.tspa.info/2020/06/17/new-organizations-dedicated...</a>