Content moderation

daily.dev is a feed of developer content, and the value of that feed depends on what we let into it. Moderation works in layers: vetted sources, automated screening, human review, and reports from the community. No single layer is sufficient, and each one exists to catch what the others miss.

Every layer enforces one standard, our content guidelines, which the Terms of Service incorporate by reference.

What we act on, and in what order

Not everything we remove is equally urgent, and treating it that way would be a mistake. We separate harm from taste.

Harm and legal violations

Zero tolerance. This content comes down as soon as we find it, and we act on the account behind it:

• Illegal content
• Explicit, obscene, or sexually explicit material
• Hate speech, harassment, abuse, threats, and content that promotes or incites discrimination or violence
• Deceptive, fraudulent, or defamatory content
• Content that violates someone's privacy or publicity rights
• Content that infringes copyright, trademarks, or other third-party rights

In this tier, being slow is worse than being wrong. We would rather take something down quickly and look at it again on request than leave it up while we deliberate.

Quality and relevance

Judgment calls. These are usually handled by demoting or removing the content rather than acting on the account:

• AI-generated content, and content that carries the characteristics of AI-generated material
• Clickbait and misleading titles that promise more than the article delivers
• Programmatic SEO and other content produced automatically at scale
• Self-promotion with no substance beyond a sales pitch
• Content that is not relevant to developers, not in English, or politically oriented

Quality is partly subjective and we know it. One reader's noise is another reader's favorite post of the week, so this is the tier where we tune rather than police, and where our calls are most open to debate.

Where content comes from

Most of what you see in your feed is indexed from established developer publications rather than submitted post by post. That vetting happens at the source level, before a single article is pulled in.

• Sources are added based on community requests, and every suggestion is reviewed manually by our team. Reviews can take up to 30 days. See suggest a new source.
• Sources must publish regularly, maintain a public feed, and meet the quality and ethics bar in the guidelines. Inactive sources are dropped.
• Corporate and personal blogs are no longer eligible as sources. Those creators are pointed to Squads instead, where content sits alongside a community and a named author.

Vetting a source once is far more effective than judging thousands of individual articles, which is why this layer carries the most weight.

Automated screening

Content that enters the platform runs through automated checks before it reaches feeds. Those checks look for the patterns behind both tiers above, and they are fast enough to keep the obvious cases out without a person in the loop.

No automated system catches everything, and detecting AI-generated writing is especially imperfect, so screening is a first pass rather than the final word.

Human review

Anything a member submits is user-generated content, and it gets moderated against the guidelines. That covers:

• Direct posts, created with the "New Post" button anywhere on daily.dev
• Squad posts, including link posts and original posts written on the platform
• Comments and discussions across the platform

This is where the subjective calls get made: whether a post is genuinely useful or just a sales pitch, whether a technical claim holds up, whether a title matches the content behind it. Automation is good at patterns and bad at context, which is why the harder decisions stay with people.

Reports from the community

Members see things our systems and our team miss, and reports are a real input to moderation rather than a formality.

To report a post, open the more options menu (⋮) on the post card, select "Report", then confirm and choose a reason. Comments and Squads can be reported the same way. See reporting posts for the flow step by step, with screenshots.

A few things worth knowing:

• Reports go to the daily.dev moderation team, which reviews them against the guidelines and acts on what it finds.
• You can follow the outcome through the "report updates" category in your notification settings.
• Reporting is not the same as blocking a tag or source, which only changes your own feed. Use blocking to tune what you see; use reporting when something breaks the rules for everyone.

Squad-level moderation

Squads have their own layer of moderation on top of the platform-wide one, run by the people who know the topic best.

• Post approval: public Squads let all members post, but admins and moderators approve posts before they go live, and edited posts need re-approval
• Content removal: admins and moderators can delete posts and comments that break the rules
• Member management: repeat offenders can be blocked from the Squad
• Roles: admins can promote trusted members to moderators to share the workload

Squad moderation is additive, never a way around the platform rules. Public Squads must comply with the content guidelines to stay visible in the Squads Directory, and a Squad that does not can be suspended or terminated. See moderating your Squad for the full toolset.

Platform integrity

Some of the most damaging behavior on a content platform is not about publishing something offensive. It is about gaming distribution.

• Reputation farming: activity intended to manipulate reputation scores can cost reputation points and lead to account suspension or a ban.
• Automation and multiple accounts: creating accounts by automated means, and using bots or scripts to scrape the platform or inflate activity, is prohibited by the Terms of Service.
• Vote manipulation: you get one vote per post, up or down. Individual downvotes stay anonymous, so voting tunes feeds instead of becoming a pile-on tool.
• Rate limits: posting, poll creation, and API access are rate limited so no single account can flood the platform.

For Cores and Awards, the creator terms also prohibit multiple-account schemes, purchased engagement, and automated distribution. Abuse there can mean withheld or reversed balances on top of the usual account actions.

Enforcement

What happens next depends on severity and history, not on who posted it.

Screening can keep a post out of feeds on its own. Actions against an account or a Squad are a decision our team makes.

If you think we got it wrong

Moderation at any scale produces mistakes in both directions: things we removed that we should not have, and things we left up too long.

If your content was removed, your reputation dropped, or your account was restricted and you believe it was an error, contact support with the post URL and what you think went wrong. We will look at the decision again.

We would rather be straight with you than imply more than we deliver: enforcement decisions are ours to make, and asking for a review does not guarantee a reversal.

Where to escalate

Next steps

• Read the content guidelines for the full list of what we accept and reject
• Learn how to get featured if you create developer content
• Set up moderation in your own Squad
• Tune your own feed by blocking tags and sources