When I worked in Counter-Abuse at Google, I found the largest issue we faced
wasn’t malicious users, but poorly thought out product decisions, and business
model constraints. It’s very hard to “fix” problems on platforms when you are
constrained to cleanup, and can’t try to change why things keep spilling.
So when the Integrity Institutute (a small thinktank on content moderation issues,
which I’ve been a member of for several years) sent out applications for visiting
fellowships, I figured it was my chance to try to do something about it.
Read the “Why I built this” recursive essay here.
The site as a whole took a ton of time to build because there was just a lot of writing to do.
As of this writing, there are 14 intervention categories, 47 harms, 64 interventions, and 9 features.
The project ultimately became a group project of the Integrity Institute. Because of that
every page needed to be fully-editable by a nontechnical audience, which presented a fun set of
challenges.
The technical elements of this project are pretty slick. It’s backed by a postgres
database running on neon.tech, which connects to Strapi, an open source CMS.
The frontend is made in Nuxt 3 with typescript, and then hosted via firebase cloud functions.
However, that’s the editing-path. Since the content is static, I set up SSG to
pre-create every page on the site, and then back-hydrate with a flat file after
first load. So the page as a whole is incredibly snappy, and costs nothing to host
since it’s just flat files for almost everyone using it, and scale-to-zero for editors.
I’ve gotten more traction on this project than I expected - it’s started a ton of conversations
with PMs, regulators, and other thinktanks. Very happy with its traction.
Browse yourself here.