How we moderate

If you're frustrated by spam cluttering the feed or confused why your post was hidden, you're not alone.

It's been incredible to see #buildinpublic grow to over 75,000 members. This means you have more people to learn from and larger audience to share your updates and journey with.

However, with this scale, it's become more challenging to moderate effectively. I'll explain why moderation decisions happen, what we're doing to improve the process, and how you can help make the #buildinpublic community better for everyone.

The Challenge of Moderating the Community

The #buildinpublic community was created to foster collaboration, learning, and sharing progress. While most posts reflect these values, some trends disrupt the experience:

• "Follow me, I'll follow you" schemes
• Generic or engagement-bait questions
• Irrelevant content and self-promotion

These posts often rise to the top of the feed due to X's algorithm, which often prioritizes engagement over relevance.

What We Currently Do

To manage these issues, we use a combination of tools and strategies:

1. Spam Filters

We use X's keyword-based spam filters to block obvious violations. While effective for many cases, these filters occasionally hide legitimate posts due to primitive matching logic. Posts discussing moderation, spam, or other violations can also trigger these filters unintentionally.

2. AI Moderation

We've partnered with Watchdog, an AI moderation tool that evaluates posts against our community rules. It hides over 100 low-quality posts daily but can sometimes flag valid posts as well. We're constantly working to refine this process.

3. Human Moderation

As a last line of defense, our moderator team steps in to review the most concerning posts. While this manual oversight helps catch severe violations, it's not a sustainable approach for handling the high volume of daily content.

What We Plan to Do

We're committed to improving moderation while minimizing mistakes. Our goals include:

• Reducing false positives: Fine-tuning AI moderation to better distinguish quality posts.
• Removing more disruptive content: Identifying patterns and automating responses to common issues.
• Adapting to new tools: Using new moderation capabilities as X continues to improve their platform.

What You Can Do

You play a key role in maintaining the community's quality. Here's how you can help:

• Post thoughtfully: Share meaningful updates and avoid low-effort content.
• Don't engage with low-quality posts: Engagement amplifies these posts in the feed.
• Report violating posts: Help our moderation team by reporting posts that break community guidelines.
• Share this page with others to help spread awareness about our community guidelines and moderation efforts.

Looking Ahead

We know this isn't a perfect system, and we appreciate your support as we work to make it better. Every improvement we make is driven by our commitment to fostering a vibrant, constructive community.

Together, we can ensure #buildinpublic remains a valuable space for everyone. Thank you for being part of this journey!

— @marckohlbrugge and the #buildinpublic team