Every article about content moderation gets one thing wrong, and it is the thing that actually took something out of me.

I'm thirty, I did it from 2020 to 2023, through a vendor — not the platform, which matters for about nine reasons. I'm out now, I work in logistics, and I signed things so I'll be general about which platform and specific about everything else.

What the articles get wrong: they frame it as repeated exposure to horror, as though the damage is cumulative shock. That's part of it. But the thing that actually took something out of me was the queue.

Here's what the work is. You get a ticket. A ticket is a piece of content plus a report reason. You have a policy document — ours ran to a few hundred pages, versioned, updated roughly weekly — and you have, in practice, between twenty and forty seconds to apply it.

You click an action. The next ticket loads automatically. There is no gap. The next ticket loads automatically is the single most important sentence I can give you about this job.

So it isn't a series of terrible images. It's a conveyor, and the terrible images are on it, interleaved with a man arguing about a football team and a copyright claim about a cooking video and something genuinely funny and then something I'm not going to describe, and the conveyor does not change speed for any of them.

You are not permitted a reaction, not because anyone forbids it but because a reaction costs you eleven seconds and your handle time is on a dashboard.

Accuracy was audited. A sample of my decisions got reviewed and I had to stay above a threshold. And the brutal part: the audits were often right. I'd get something wrong because the policy had a carve-out I'd half-remembered, and a reviewer would be correct, and I'd absorb that as a personal failing even though the policy had changed twice that month.

What it did to me, in order of how much:

The thing people expect — specific images that return — yes, there are four. Four in three years. They come at predictable times and I have a therapist and they're manageable and honestly they're not the headline.

The thing that's worse: I lost the ability to be uncertain. The job trains a binary reflex. Thirty seconds, pick a bucket, next. And that reflex does not stay at work. I became a person who formed a verdict on everything instantly — a friend's relationship, a news story, a stranger — because three years of my nervous system had been rewarded for speed and penalized for sitting with something.

My girlfriend at the time said I'd started "ruling on" her. That's the word she used. She was right and I didn't understand it for another year.

And the thing nobody mentions at all: I became unable to believe that the volume means anything. When you've seen the raw feed, you know how much of it there is, and the knowledge is not useful. You can't un-know the denominator. I have a hard time with people who are outraged about a single incident, not because they're wrong but because I keep thinking: there were four thousand today.

On the support: we had wellness sessions. Group ones, forty-five minutes, with a counselor who was kind and had eighteen people. They were not useless. They were nine percent of what the job required. The real support in that building was four people on my team and a group chat, and that is true of every job like this and the company knows it.

Why I left: in 2023 I caught myself annoyed at a piece of content for being ambiguous. Annoyed. At the content. For making my handle time worse. And I went out to my car and sat there for forty minutes.

If you're considering it because it pays better than the warehouse: it does, by a little. Take it for a year if you need to. Do not take it for three. And the day you notice you're irritated instead of affected, that's the signal, don't talk yourself out of it like I did for eleven months.