When I Realized My App Needed Content Moderation (and What I Learned)

A couple of months ago, I launched a small side project: a community-driven app where people could share short posts and resources. At first, everything looked fine. My early adopters were friendly, the content was engaging, and I was excited about the traction.

Then reality hit.

Within just a few weeks, I started noticing the darker side of “user-generated content”:
•Spam posts with links to shady sites
•Users harassing each other in the comments
•Misinformation being shared as facts

At first, I tried to manually clean things up. But as more users joined, it became impossible to keep up. It’s one thing to delete a few spam posts — it’s another when dozens of them appear daily, some of them subtle enough to slip through.

Like many developers, my first instinct was: let’s use AI to filter this stuff out. I plugged in a few free tools, and while they helped a bit, I quickly discovered their limits. AI was flagging harmless jokes as “offensive” and missing more nuanced issues like sarcasm or cultural context. On the other hand, relying only on human moderators wasn’t sustainable either — I didn’t have the time or resources to hire a team.

That’s when I started looking for hybrid solutions — something that combines AI efficiency with human judgment. I came across Outharm, which does exactly that: AI handles scale, humans handle context. Suddenly, my tiny app didn’t feel like an unsafe playground anymore.

Here’s what I learned through this experience:
1.Moderation is not optional. If you’re building a product with user-generated content, don’t wait until problems appear. Plan for it early.
2.AI isn’t magic. It’s powerful, but context is everything.
3.Users notice safety. When communities feel unsafe, they leave. When they feel protected, they stay.

As developers, we often obsess over features, design, and growth — but sometimes the unsexy things, like content moderation, decide whether our product survives.

If you’re in the same boat, don’t wait until it’s too late. Your future self (and your users) will thank you.