Behind the Scenes – How We Design the Content Moderation Tool of Tomorrow.

One of the questions we are often asked when speaking with site owners is, “What makes your content moderation tool different from what we have developed in-house?”

There are multiple parts to the answer. Some very pragmatic and tied directly to features and some a bit more impalpable and tied to potential and tool capability.  Features are easy to explain and compare, but when it comes to the more intangible values a longer explanation is warranted.

In our previous blog post, Buy or Build? The Decision Whether to Outsource Your Content Moderation or Not, we touched on the benefits of buying a tool from someone who has moderation as a core business rather than spending your own resources on building something from scratch.

In this post, we want to go a bit more into details by focusing on how our experience, the diversity of our team and the close collaboration we have with our customers help us plan the best possible tool. A tool that is efficient here and now, but also ready to take on future content moderation challenges. Product Owner Olivier Vencencius walks us through how we leverage our experience in the ongoing design of Implio and how we ensure that we are always one step ahead of market trends.

Interviewer: How do you prioritize the release of different features?

Olivier: By being close to our clients, our users and our prospects. We talk with them, engage them and ask a lot of questions. From there, we create a map that shows the pains and the frequency of problems and needs that marketplaces encounter. Problems with the highest levels of pain and frequency are considered critical and will be prioritized by the product team. We also align our roadmap closely with our product vision and other business objectives.

Interviewer: How do you ensure that we’re building a tool that can handle tomorrow’s content moderation challenges?

Olivier: Once we know the priority of the problems to solve, we do extensive discovery work on each of them. We don’t only focus on solving a specific problem; we are dedicated to finding the best solution possible that will benefit marketplaces and our vision for Implio. To achieve this, we start with extensive research on the solutions on the market today. That includes in-house-developed tools for potential customers, competitor solutions, new technologies, and more.

Then we sketch our own solution, prototype it and validate it with customers and users before actually starting the implementation. Most of the time we need to iterate a couple of times before finding the right solution. This process is a loop where the goal is to continuously learn and improve.

Interviewer: How do you predict trends in moderation and in customer needs?

Olivier: We work closely with our customers and continuously collaborate on how we can improve Implio in a way that will answer to their needs. We’re lucky enough to have clients who are open to this type of relationship and regularly provide us with a lot of valuable feedback and information. We complement this feedback loop with a quantitative analysis using the data generated by Implio. These statistics give us great insights on new trends and the constantly evolving needs of the users.

Interviewer: How do you keep up to date with new technology?

Olivier: Our product and engineering is made up of people who are all passionate about technology. We are following specialized forums and love to discuss ideas with our peers. The team members are also given dedicated time to research and create prototypes independently. The outcomes are then presented to the rest of the team during lecturing sessions. In the future this will be emphasized further as our merger with ioSquare brings in a team focused on applied and non-applied research. Finally, over time we have built a wide network of partners and experts in specific areas that we lean on for expert knowledge. This network has been further extended thanks to the recent addition of ioSquare’s expertise.

Interviewer: What’s the biggest challenge in integrating ioSquare’s technology with Implio?

Olivier: Both ioSquare’s and Besedo’s solutions have been built with scalability and flexibility in mind, so from a technical standpoint merging the two solutions is going to be relatively easy. The challenge is getting the two entities to build a common vision, values and objectives, which we’re working hard on at the moment. We’re aligning our ways of working, sharing our knowledge and adapting the teams. It’s a challenge but it’s a fun one and the outcome is bound to be positive.

Interviewer: What upcoming feature in Implio are you most excited about?

Olivier: The most exciting part right now is the integration with the AI capabilities brought by ioSquare. That will really enable us to provide the best automated moderation for our customers. We’re also building a new search engine in Implio. We want something that is scalable and extremely fast. This combined with the automation will allow our users to moderate and manage their content easier than ever before.

Olivier Vencencius

As you can see, our product team is working hard to research and predict trends in moderation needs while also focusing on building the best tool possible for our clients’ challenges.

We can’t wait to tackle the content moderation demands of the future. Can you?

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