Erik Swain Is Cleaning Up the Internet's Messiest Room

There is an old piece of internet advice that doubles as a confession: don't read the comments. It sounds sensible. It also concedes an entire public square to whoever arrives with the most bile, the cheapest scam or the greatest quantity of spare time. Erik Swain read them anyway. Beneath a post of Serena Williams with her child, he saw racist abuse so brazen that the usual shrug no longer worked. The comments were not some minor stain around the content. They were the experience.

This was 2019, and Swain had already spent more than two decades close to the commercial machinery of the web. He had worked through AOL, Datalogix and SpotX, helping three young digital-media companies grow into businesses with significant exits. His public biography places him near a string of formative moments: serving an early banner ad in 1996, connecting offline data to online targeting in 2008, and helping launch an early programmatic video marketplace in 2011. By the time social networks became the world's running conversation, he knew exactly how much science went into getting a message in front of a person.

What happened after that message landed was another matter. Marketers tuned audiences, bids, creative and conversion funnels with jeweler's concentration. Then they hit post and left the replies to resemble a pub after closing. Swain and his colleagues saw two imperatives in the mess: people deserved protection from abuse, and brands were squandering a channel they had paid handsomely to create. The company they built around that observation became Respondology.

“Everyone says ‘don't read the comment sections.’ Hopefully we can change that.”Erik Swain

A career in the machinery

Swain's route to moderation was not the familiar founder fable of a brilliant outsider overturning a sleepy industry. He was an operator who had been inside several versions of the industry while it was still being assembled. At AOL he earned the advertising division's employee-of-the-year recognition in 1998. At Datalogix, he worked in operations and corporate marketing as data became the fuel for audience targeting. At SpotX, where he served as a senior operations executive, the problem was video and the emerging programmatic market.

In a 2013 interview about SpotXchange, he argued that publishers needed visibility into every advertiser bidding for their inventory. “Our platform lets publishers call the shots,” he said. The phrase reveals a durable preference. Swain likes systems that restore agency to the party otherwise asked to accept the platform's terms. In ad exchanges, that party was the publisher. In a comment stream, it is the brand, the team, the athlete and, ultimately, the ordinary person trying to join a conversation without wading through abuse.

His biography is not all dashboards and deal flow. At the University of San Diego, where he studied from 1987 to 1991, Swain played lacrosse, was named the team's MVP in his senior year and later entered its lacrosse hall of fame. He still follows American and European football and surfs. Sports would become more than leisure. It supplied Respondology with a vivid proving ground, because a team's comment section is part scoreboard, part town hall and part food fight.

The business hiding under the post

Respondology's moderation product combines keyword and emoji lists, business rules, generative AI and feedback from human moderators. The mixture matters. A slur can be caught by a list. Context is slipperier. An otherwise harmless emoji can become an attack when placed beneath a particular image. Brands also differ in what they consider off-topic, damaging or merely impolite. The system has to read the room, and the room changes with every post.

By 2025 the company said it served about 100 paying customers covering 450 brands, including consumer companies, sports organizations and agencies. Its sports roster included NFL and NHL teams and Premier League clubs. Swain's explanation is admirably practical: teams spend millions on fan experience, but the experience does not stop at the stadium gate. A stream filled with racism, homophobia, scams and bots repels the new fans a club hopes to welcome and makes existing fans less inclined to speak.

The economic case follows the human one. Respondology has reported higher engagement and stronger returns on paid social after instant moderation, though those results belong to the company and should be read as such. The underlying mechanism is plausible without a trumpet: people participate when the space looks inhabitable. A cleaned comment section also protects sponsors from appearing beside content no contract writer would willingly place in a brand deck.

The discreetness is part of the design. When a toxic comment is hidden, its author may still see it. Everyone else is spared. This gives the provocateur less evidence that the provocation worked. It is less a dramatic banishment than a velvet rope no one announces. Good moderation can be almost boring, which is a compliment. The party simply improves.

Remove the noise. Keep the signal.

Moderation turned out to be the first move rather than the whole game. Once Respondology had gathered and cleaned millions of comments, customers began asking an obvious question: what can we learn from them? Their fans were discussing shirts, players, schedules, prices, ingredients and campaigns in ordinary language. Surveys ask people to report what they think. Comments catch them in the act of thinking it.

That request became Discover, a product released in late 2024 to translate sprawling conversations into themes and audience intelligence. A third product, Respond, was planned to help brands answer questions and engage people at scale. Swain's phrase for the combined suite is “comment activation platform.” It sounds like marketing language because it is, but the product sequence is clean enough to remember: protect the conversation, understand the conversation, join the conversation.

There is a useful product lesson tucked inside that progression. The best roadmap request often begins after the first problem is genuinely solved. Customers do not ask for sophisticated analysis while they are still drowning in spam. Reliability earns the right to move up the stack. Swain's company began with sanitation and found intelligence underneath. The janitor discovered a focus group in the room.

In April 2025, Respondology raised a $5 million Series A-1 from existing backers including Iron Gate Capital and SJF Ventures, following an $11 million Series A in 2023. The new capital was earmarked for product development and hiring across AI engineering, sales and marketing. Swain told a Boulder business publication that the company had been growing between 50 and 60 percent a year. His ambition was characteristically expansive: reach every comment section in the world.

The uncomfortable efficiency

Swain does not reserve candor for the product pitch. In a 2026 post, he wrote that AI had saved Respondology from making at least five planned hires over a quarter. No existing employees had been replaced, he stressed, but faster coding, quickly built product prototypes and sales-support agents meant new roles did not open. As a CEO balancing growth and profitability, he found the efficiency useful. As a father with children nearing the job market, he found it concerning.

The admission lands because it refuses the soothing abstraction that surrounds most corporate talk about AI. Productivity is a percentage until it is somebody's first job. Swain wrote that he lived in both camps. Then, with a small comic flourish, he said he was closing Claude, turning off his phone and taking an old-school walk. The walk does not solve the labor question. It does make the person asking it easier to recognize.

Respondology itself carries a similar tension. It uses machines to read at a scale humans cannot, while relying on human judgment to sharpen those machines. The goal is automation in service of a more human conversation. That promise deserves scrutiny, particularly when a private company moderates public-facing speech for brands. It also deserves precision. Respondology is not a government referee or a universal censor. It gives account owners tools to enforce their own standards on the pages they operate.

The founder's wager is simple: once the worst voices stop owning the room, everyone else may speak.

Whistling while the model works

Company values are usually written in a dialect found nowhere in nature. Respondology's list contains one line with a pulse: “Whistle While You Work.” The supporting idea is to take the work seriously without taking oneself too seriously. It fits a CEO whose technology can reportedly recognize abuse in Morse code and Klingon, a fact perched somewhere between disturbing and delightful. Humanity has imagined languages for interstellar diplomacy and promptly found ways to troll in them.

Other published values - impact over intention, ownership without ego, build rather than blame - describe the operating culture Swain says he wants. They also mirror the product. Moderation is judged by what remains visible, not by the elegance of the model. A brand cannot blame the platform after inviting customers into its own comment stream. Somebody must own the room.

Swain's career has followed attention across the internet. First came the banner, then the targeted audience, then programmatic video, then social advertising. Now his work begins at the precise moment the campaign manager's report often ends. The post is live. The audience answers. What they say can wound a person, embarrass a sponsor, reveal a product flaw or announce a desire. Treating all of it as noise is easy. Separating poison from signal is harder, and therefore a business.

The comment section will never become a drawing room. It is too immediate, too public and too temptingly consequence-free. Swain is betting it can become usable: a place with fewer vandals, better listeners and a brand representative who remembers to answer the door. The internet may remain messy. At least someone has volunteered to bring a broom and, if the company name is any guide, stay for the conversation.