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5 min read T&S Insider

Can anyone do T&S work for 20 years?

Is Trust & Safety a career for life — or a job that burns people out before they get there? The reaction to a viral LinkedIn post suggests many experienced professionals are starting to wonder the same.

I'm Alice Hunsberger. Trust & Safety Insider is my weekly rundown on the topics, industry trends and workplace strategies that trust and safety professionals need to know about to do their job.

This week, I'm thinking about whether I (or anyone) can reasonably do T&S work for 20+ years, or if we should all quit to work as a lighthouse keeper.

Ben and I are cooking up a series on T&S careers and we'd love your inputs to shape it. So T&S Insider readers, tell me how you're thinking about your career — are you fed up with the state of the industry, excited about the changes or just tired? Oh and not forgetting the jobs you'd do if you weren't a T&S professional. Get in touch or just hit reply — Alice

IN PARTNERSHIP WITH with Resolver Trust & Safety

The internet speaks every language — and over time, the best safety teams have learned to truly listen.

In the early days of Trust & Safety, many risk detection frameworks were built for English, missing nuances, slang, and coded languages globally. 

Our third piece in the “20 Years in Online Safety” series explores how this blind spot shaped the industry, and how learning from language and culture became one of Resolver’s most powerful risk detection tools. 

Featuring cases from our analysts, it’s a reflection on how context became intelligence, and how understanding cultural cues changed the way we identify harms. 

Because online safety isn't just about what's said—it’s about what’s meant.

READ MORE HERE

15 years down, how many more to go?

Why this matters: The industry is losing experienced professionals to burnout at an alarming rate. If we can't figure out how to make this work sustainable, we risk losing the institutional knowledge, community culture, and mission-driven practitioners who make online spaces safer.

This week, Daisy Soderberg-Rivkin's LinkedIn post about the T&S career trajectory was the most viral T&S-related post I've ever seen, with more than 1,000 reactions in just a few days.

In case you haven't seen it yet, Rivkin — who has 10+ years of online safety experience herself — runs through a typical T&S career progression from idealistic community steward to being burned out and quitting the industry almost 20 years later.

The post immediately hit a nerve for many of us and for good reason. It's completely true. I've written about why T&S is hard work and why it can lead to burn out more times than I'd like to admit. Many of the comments on Soderberg-Rivkin's post said as much.

I'm 15 years into my T&S career, 20 if you include the unpaid community moderation I did at the start. I haven't quit yet, though I've certainly burned out a couple of times.

So Soderberg-Rivkin's post got me asking myself a question I've thought about a lot recently but don't yet have an answer to: what does it take to do this work sustainably for 20+ years?

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Published by:

Alice Hunsberger

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