A guide for platform leaders building community health strategy and infrastructure.
The platforms that are struggling most with trust and safety right now are not the ones that lack moderation tools. They are the ones that built moderation as a response layer rather than a design layer. Every escalation, every crisis, every regulatory inquiry traces back to the same root: community health was treated as something you deploy after something goes wrong, not something you architect before it does.
This series is about changing that.
What the Community Health Playbook covers
- Why community health is a design and infrastructure problem, not a moderation problem
- How to build policy that reflects platform values rather than just prohibited behaviors
- What a mature sanctions framework looks like beyond account bans
- How to sequence automation without ceding human judgment at the moments it matters most
- What metrics actually signal community health, and which ones create false confidence
- How compliance requirements fit into a broader governance architecture
- What good looks like across platforms at different stages of maturity
Your Trust Stack Podcast
Conversations with the people designing and running trust, safety, and moderation programs.
Civility Is the Safety Feature
Nathan Sawatzky, Supercell · 27:26
Brands Should Set the Culture, Not the Community
Annabel Ashalley-Anthony, Melanin Gamers · 25:22
Age Verification Is Finally Scaling
Luc Delany, k-ID · 44:50
Beyond Moderation: Building Trust with Parents
Laura Higgins, Roblox · 33:22
Community health is a design problem
Moderation is a signal. When it is overwhelmed, it is telling you something about the structure underneath.
When a platform experiences a trust and safety failure, harassment escalates, a policy proves unenforceable, or a moderation backlog creates visible harm, the instinct is to fix the moderation layer. Add reviewers, tune the classifier, tighten the policy. That is the wrong level to intervene.
When moderation is overwhelmed, it is telling you that behavioral norms were never established clearly, that policy did not translate into enforceable rules, or that the reward architecture incentivizes the wrong behaviors. You cannot moderate your way out of a design failure.
Community health is the condition in which a platform’s behavioral environment supports the goals of the people using it. That condition is produced by deliberate design choices: how the platform surfaces norms, how it responds to violations, how it structures participation, how it handles identity and accountability. None of those choices belong to the moderation team. They belong to product, policy, leadership, and the people who built the platform in the first place.
The real question is not “how do we handle bad behavior” but “what are we designing for?” Most platforms can answer the first question. Very few have answered the second.
This is not an abstract framing. It has direct operational consequences. Platforms that treat community health as infrastructure make different decisions about onboarding, feature design, policy language, appeals processes, and automation thresholds. Platforms that treat it as incident response retrofit those same decisions under pressure, usually after something has already gone wrong.
The Community Health Playbook is built around the premise that the shift from reactive moderation to proactive ecosystem health is achievable, but it requires a different set of questions, frameworks, and organizational commitments than most platforms currently have in place.
Three tracks, three layers of the problem
Strategy informs policy, which informs automation. The tracks are sequential in logic, not rigid prerequisites.
Strategy and Leadership
Establishes the conceptual foundation: what community health actually means as a platform objective, where community systems typically fail, and how compliance requirements should be positioned within, not as a substitute for, a genuine health strategy. This is the layer most senior leaders need to engage with first, because it determines how every downstream decision gets framed.
- The five lenses every platform must simultaneously balance: compliance, brand, UX, scalability, and legitimacy
- Why compliance is a floor, not a finish line
- Where community systems structurally break down and how to diagnose the failure mode
- How to position regulatory requirements within a genuine health strategy
Policy and Operations
The practitioner layer. It covers how to build policy that is enforceable and values-aligned, what a mature sanctions framework looks like, and how positive reinforcement fits into a system that too often focuses exclusively on prohibition and punishment. This track is where T&S leads, community managers, and policy teams will find the most immediately applicable material.
- Cross-functional ownership models for community health
- How to write policy that is enforceable, values-aligned, and legible to users
- Graduated sanctions frameworks beyond account bans
- Positive reinforcement as a health design mechanism, not just a growth tactic
Automation and Measurement
Covers the technical and analytical infrastructure that sustains community health at scale. It addresses automation sequencing, the maturity model for AI-assisted moderation, and what to actually measure. Metrics that capture queue throughput and appeal rates tell you about operational efficiency. They do not tell you whether the community is healthy.
- Sequenced automation maturity: four phases from shadow mode to scaled deployment
- Which moderation categories should stay manual regardless of model performance
- The metrics that actually signal community health vs. the ones that create false confidence
- How to build a leading-indicator dashboard
Read the playbook
Each lesson is published in full here. New lessons are added as the series continues.
CHP: The Five Lenses Every Platform Must Balance
Community Health Playbook: Track 1, Lesson 1 A trust and safety framework for platform leaders, product managers, and T&S leads Every major T&S decision your platform has made in the last 12 months was a negotiation between competing pressures, whether or not
Read lesson →
CHP: Compliance is a Floor, Not a Ceiling
Community Health Playbook: Track 1, Lesson 2 A guide for platform leaders and T&S teams on COPPA 2.0 compliance, DSA requirements, and the community health strategy that begins where regulation ends What This Lesson Covers What the DSA, COPPA 2.0, and their pe
Read lesson →
CHP: Where Community Systems Break Down
Community Health Playbook: Track 1, Lesson 3 A guide for platform leaders and T&S teams on the community health failure modes that produce trust and safety crises, and the maturity model for diagnosing where your system is now The most expensive trust and safe
Read lesson →Written for people with operational responsibility
It assumes some operational context: a policy that exists, a moderation function that is running, a product that has users.
Trust & Safety leads
Building or rebuilding policy and enforcement infrastructure.
Product managers and platform operators
Making feature design and behavioral architecture decisions.
Executives and board members
Who need a shared language for community health investment beyond compliance exposure.
Gaming platforms will recognize the specific dynamics this series addresses: kids as content creators, peer-to-peer economies, voice and image moderation challenges, seasonal risk windows around major events. But the framework applies to any platform where community behavior is a product outcome, not just a risk to manage.