This content was created by Max Brun. This content was uploaded by Max Brun. This is a YouTube Q&A titled "Amir Nathoo Q&A On The Role Trust & Safety Plays With Outschool As A Marketplace" (created 2024-12-25). The excerpt captures a dialog between an interviewer (Speaker A) and Amir Nathoo (Speaker B) discussing trust & safety and moderation design for the Outschool marketplace. Topics covered include whether to run an open vs. managed marketplace, vetting teachers (background checks, teacher application), content policies requiring classes to be secular, objective, and age-appropriate, the rationale tied to early homeschool adopters, examples of problematic/biased content, and the domain-specific nature of these design choices.
Chapters
I actually want to jump in here and ask a question that a founder wanted to ask me in advance and sent me. But it's around the role that trust and safety plays with Outschool and maybe some of the measures that you're taking with potentially vetting teachers. So could you share more about that?
That's a great question because it's a core design question for a marketplace. Are you a completely open marketplace? Are you managed? Are you somewhat managed? Are you fully managed? Especially with marketplaces involving labor, then there's a question of, are you a platform serving independent businesses on the supply side, or are you ultimately kind of a W-2 employer. Lots of issues around that. We learned, well, at first we created the marketplace as open with kind of vetting after the fact. So in the very earliest stages, you know, with, you know, the first version of the self-serve supply side was you could put a class up and then we'd kind of check after the fact whether it was rubbish. But because it's such a small community, an insular community, that, you know, in itself kind of provided us some reassurance. But we very quickly, but we always thought that in education, this couldn't be completely open. This just couldn't be completely open. This can't be a Wild West like YouTube. We wouldn't be able to retain parent trust if we do it. So we always intended to manage it. But the question was how much? And what we landed on was we have to be more open than the school system. But honestly, that's not hard. It's really not hard, but we actually wanna go quite a lot further than being— so tend towards openness because that encourages experimentation, learning, and liquidity. And it's also a design feature based on our thesis about demand. This is a market where we believe personalization is extremely important. The best teacher for one kid is not the best teacher for another. And we'd also have to check ourselves. We watch some of these class videos from the early classes and we see this teacher, oh, this, I'm not sure this is good. The kids loved it. And so you, as an adult, you've also gotta be kind of, be a bit humble that there's a good fit for kids and you might not think it's good, but, but if it, you know, as long as it meets certain criteria and the kids love it, then you should let it go. So we, we opted to be managed but be very liberal. Now, how do we manage? Well, safety. We can't have predators on the platform. We can't have bad acts on the platform. So we need, need background checks. We need a teacher application process. And then content policies. So while we don't want to set curriculum and we want to enable experimentation for teachers to teach classes, we need to put some limits in place. And the limits we put in place are, we need, we, our content policy is that classes must be secular, objective, and age-appropriate. And by objective, we, by secular, we mean you can teach a class on religion, you just can't do religious instruction. By objective, we mean the majority of experts in this field would agree that this is a reasonable way for the class to be taught. And age-appropriate is, you know, following guidelines from the World Health Organization and other international institutions that this is appropriate content for this age or not appropriate content for this age. We set those, but those are very specific to our domain and also kind of specific to some of the challenges of our domain. So if you're thinking about these design choices for your marketplace, it's very domain-specific. Why those particular ones? Why secular? Well, our early adopter audience was homeschoolers, and a lot of people have a preconception that homeschooling is done for very kind of extreme religious reasons. We were worried about being tarred with that brush when we went to a wider audience. And our early adopter audience were hypersensitive to have religion stuffed down their throats. They insisted that we have a secular policy, but they didn't want religious curriculum. So it's driven by customers and driven by strategy, not ideology. And then objectives. Similarly, like, we kind of want to go for the widest, widest audience and eliminate sources of distraction and controversy. And so by having kind of some light guidelines around, like, how social studies should be, should we talk, like, in the early days, we had, like, a history class. And it was the most jingoistic. It was like a brief history of America. It was the most jingoistic crap you could ever imagine. Like, you know, like everything from like, um, you know, scare stories about Islamic terrorism to, to like, uh, to complete whitewashing of history. It was the most biased thing in the world ever. It's like, we— there's no way we can have this on a learning platform, history be taught this way. We have to put some limits in here. Um, and yeah, that led to the Objective And then, and, you know, age-appropriate is kind of obvious when it comes to the main. But so if you're going to manage, then manage in a way that's very, very appropriate to the main, I think is the only generalization to make here.
