Spotify in July started to allow listeners to comment on podcast episodes through the app, and it is now expanding its new set of controls for podcasters to monitor and police comments.

While initially when the firm launched its comments, podcasters were responsible for curating and publishing comments-they no longer are. A new auto-moderation tool can be configured to filter out sensitive or inappropriate comments for review and publish the rest.

Setting it to "Standard" will mean that Spotify will not post the comments that come across as probably sensitive or not suitable and will redirect those for evaluation to the podcaster. On setting it to "High," the tool would withhold all comments until they were approved while at "Low" would auto-post comments except those violating Spotify rules.

Says Spotify, even though a creator published comments that were marked as sensitive or set the auto-moderation level to "Low," such sensitive comments are still hidden and the user had to tap on "Show all comments" to view them.
A user can include words, phrases, or emojis into a blocklist; then, comments which contain them are immediately moved to review queue.

In addition, creators can even silence comments on any episodes they wish.
This company also aims to launch support for additional languages for this feature in the future.

But for now, in keeping with the fact that we are still testing and building our automatic detection systems to support other languages, all non-English comments will have to be reviewed and approved in Spotify for Podcasters, but we expect to support several more languages shortly," the company said in a blog post.

Spotify said that users have posted 2.5 million comments across 650,000 episodes since it started offering the feature back in July, and that 44% of published comments get a like or a reply from the show's creator.

Spotify has been trying to make podcasts more engaging for a pretty long time now. Just in its last effort, the company added support for Q&As, polls, and video podcasts. Earlier this year, the company said people who use any of these features to engage with podcasts are four times more likely to listen to the show again within 30 days.