Build vs. Buy Moderation: The Ultimate Decision Guide for Trust & Safety

Content moderation is a crucial aspect of online platforms, acting as the unseen backbone that ensures the safety and integrity of user interactions across various content types such as text, images, video, audio, and livestreams. The challenge for companies lies in deciding whether to develop a custom moderation system tailored to their specific needs or to adopt a vendor solution that offers quicker deployment and proven scalability. The decision is influenced by several factors, including the platform's risk profile, regulatory obligations, the need for real-time moderation, and the complexity of managing global and multilingual content. Building an in-house system offers maximum control but comes with significant costs and responsibilities, such as ongoing maintenance, operational burdens, and opportunity costs that could detract from the company's core product development. On the other hand, vendor solutions provide immediate benefits like faster implementation, established scale, and regulatory compliance, albeit with less customization and recurring costs. The choice often hinges on whether moderation is a core differentiator for the business or merely an enabling feature, with the latter scenario generally favoring a vendor solution to allow the company to focus on its primary value proposition. Stream offers a moderation platform that integrates advanced AI capabilities, such as those from OpenAI, to provide comprehensive and adaptable moderation solutions, allowing companies to efficiently manage moderation without diverting resources from their main business objectives.