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Comment by JoshTriplett | Hacker News Reader

You're also going to have to deal with cases where the creator of a sub-community fails to do their job as a moderator (or actively works against it). In the limiting case, if you get a DMCA takedown notice, get a GDPR notice, get a C&D, discover illicit materials of other types, discover that people are using your site to plan crimes/attacks/etc, or any number of other things, you're still responsible for that.

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Ah yes, those are things I need to think about eventually. Thanks for the advice.

It's worth noting that emergent communities like this devolve into fascism pretty quickly (as more forums, reddit, & fb groups have proven) so you might want to think about this / bring in someone who is an expert on community management.

You're right, it's not something I want to put off till it's too late. Thanks for the advice!

Definitely look carefully at the absolute worst that can be found on the Internet, and the worst that sites with user-submitted content have to deal with, and decide in advance what you do and don't want to support. Anything you don't want to say "yeah, I'd be completely fine hosting that without hesitation" about, you should think about now, and put in corresponding policies now.

Having policies in advance means people will just go elsewhere. Trying to add such policies later, when you have existing users, will be much harder. You're likely to want to draw that line somewhere; better to draw it in advance.

(I've dealt with user-generated content before; please feel free to reach out privately if you'd like to talk about it further.)

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