Patreon changes ‘archaic’ reporting tool, adds more human moderators
Patreon, the crowdfunding site popular with vloggers, podcasters, and other content creators, is updating its Trust and Safety department with better tools and more human moderators, making it easier to report inappropriate content.
The decision comes as the 4-year-old startup becomes an even more of an attractive source of revenue for content creators, especially in the wake of YouTube's rule changes for monetization.
With the update, there are no changes to Patreon's terms of service or community guidelines. Rather, it's fixing Patreon's "archaic" content reporting tool, Patreon’s head of legal Colin Sullivan told Mashable.
"It's seriously a Google Form that gets sent to a Google Sheet, and we have to manually go through all the text," Sullivan said.
Now, the tool will be made available on any creator page by clicking a new "more" button and every posts by clicking the three dots.
One of the major flaws in Patreon's old system is it treated all reported or flagged content equally, making it harder to discern between legitimate concerns and spam. Now, Patreon will be able to analyze a large number of reports more easily.
The new tool requires users to be logged onto their Patreon account in order to submit a report. In the updated Help Center article, Patreon advises its community to message a creator if they are simply not happy with the quality of their work.
As for addressing legitimate violations, the system will now be able to analyze text, and therefore, better prioritize reports. For example, the system sorts by creator and the reason for flagged, and then batches reports together.
Patreon began building the new system a few months back. So, why the wait?
Well, it's a good time to get more serious as Patreon tries to lure YouTube creators who were affected by the site's updated guidelines on being eligible for advertising revenue.
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The delay has also been about prioritization for the startup.
"We wanted to have it on the Trust and Safety team for years," Sullivan said. "Prioritization is always a thing that you have to deal with at any startup, at any company in general, but especially small startups. So it hasn't been a priority up until now, but now we've been expanding the size of the team, and I think we're just at a point where we're growing pretty quickly across the board."
In May, Patreon's shared it had more than 1 million active patrons and more than 50,000 active creators. But regardless of scale, as a community-based platform for creators and patrons, shouldn't Trust and Safety be considered the number one priority? When asked that very question, Sullivan did respond, "Yes," and then elaborated on the nuances of how Patreon operates and the role of that department.
"It’s about making Patreon a welcoming home for all creators."
"For us, it’s about making Patreon a welcoming home for all creators. That means that some creators won’t be [allowed] on the platform ... Over the past six months, there have been a few instances where we didn't have enough people on the Trust and Safety team, and we realized we need more people," Sullivan said.
Patreon has been hiring, following a trend of tech companies putting more humans in charge of moderation and not just relying on technology. Patreon has five employees dedicated to Trust and Safety and plans to double that to 10 by the end of the year.
In contrast to many tech companies, Patreon's moderators are exclusively employees and not contractors. Of course, that's easier to maintain when you're not dealing with more than 2 billion users like Facebook or millions of tweets sent per day on Twitter.
"We’re small enough that we really want to make sure we’re creating a culture for the team," Sullivan said. "We really feel like that should be full-time employees building that, and we want them to have a high-level understanding of what that policy is."
Although Sullivan did admit that as Patreon grows it may recruit contractors to handle moderation and report requests. Regardless of employment status, the goal is to prioritize human moderation over any algorithmic control.
Topics Social Media YouTube
Kerry Flynn is a business reporter for Mashable covering the tech industry. She previously reported on social media companies, mobile apps and startups for International Business Times. She has also written for The Huffington Post, Forbes and Money magazine. Kerry studied environmental science and economics at Harvard College, where she led The Harvard Crimson's metro news and design teams and played mellophone in the Band. When not listening to startup pitches, she runs half-marathons, plays with puppies and pretends to like craft beer.
