this post was submitted on 17 May 2025
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It's because we've seen this so many times and are really tired of this: Everybody knows that you have to moderate user generated content. If you provide a upload function for user generated content and don't have a clear moderation policy in place and a moderation team, you will allow scammers, child porn, drug dealers and crypto scammers onto your platform. That has happened hundreds or thousands of times. And then some newspaper will do a report and they will remove some of the mentioned content without doing anything.
Spotify has smart employees. Some of them even worked at other companies who ran into the same issues. But they still decided to launch the feature like that, mostly because upper management really doesn't want to pay the costs of functional moderation. That is how Facebook went on to be used in the genocide in Myanmar. That is how thousands of minors got abused. Moderate your shit. There is no way around and AI won't help you
I'd imagine that you could even take podcasts and run them through a speech recognition app much like visual voicemail does. This could then parse the text and flag a podcast for manual review by a human to ban an account, could even auto suspend the account until its challenged or reviewed. You don't even need someone to listen to everything since Podcasts and usually spoke word.
Hell I bet I could build a pipeline to run on a local server in under a week that does this. Download the audio. Parse it into text. Then parse the text for any trigger words or phrases.
I dislike that you can't block NSFW stuff. My son found NSFW stuff on Spotify.. and I had to take it off our Living Room Tv and ban him from using it for now. I think you can block accounts, but there were so many.. Go ahead, search tits on Spotify.. fucking wild to me it's not moderated.
We gave the kids access to Spotify Kids, I think it's ok so far.
Huh, I had never thought to search for tits on Spotify, but now I see I was wrong for not doing so.
You’re saying that Spotify don’t have employee moderators for uploaded podcasts, which they do. In this era of every person thinking they’re an influencer and everyone needs to hear what they say, the issue is that likely no matter how many they have, the number of episodes that get uploaded will always dwarf them, so they rely on their auto-moderators to find the most egregious rule breakers. They can’t catch everything there though. If a customer finds a rule breaker and reports it, they’ll take action - that’s good!
The alternative is that every single episode of every single podcast has to be manually reviewed and approved before it goes live, which is not feasible.
Please take a look into the articles. That really was something that a good moderation team should find and they really didn't need to listen to every podcast: