Moderation And Rules in Online Communities

Effective regulation is one of the most important factors that make online communities successful. While communities are certainly governed by platform policies such as user agreements and content policies, the majority of the moderation work is accomplished by volunteer moderators who enforce rules created by their own communities. In this project, we deeply investigate the moderation ecosystem of online communities—What are the existing rules? How are these rules created and enforced? How do the moderation teams work behind the scene? And how does the moderation ecosystem expand across multiple communities and platforms?

Our prior work includes a mixed-methods study of 100,000 subreddits and their rules. Our findings characterize the types of rules across Reddit, the frequency of rules at scale, and patterns of rules based on subreddit characteristics. We find that rules appear to be context-dependent for individual subreddits but also share common characteristics across the site. Taken together, our findings provide a rich description of this ecosystem of rules, motivating further inquiry into underlying mechanisms for rule formation and enforcement in online communities.

Publications

Characterizing Community Guidelines on Social Media Platforms Jiang, Jialun "Aaron" and Middler, Skyler and Brubaker, Jed R. and Fiesler, Casey
CSCW 2020 Companion
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Technological Frames and User Innovation: Evidence from Online Community Moderation Teams Kiene, Charles and Jiang, Jialun "Aaron" and Hill, Benjamin Mako
Proc. ACM Hum.-Comput. Interact. 3, CSCW: Article 44
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- DOI: 10.1145/3359146
Moderation Challenges in Voice-based Online Communities on Discord Jiang, Jialun "Aaron" and Kiene, Charles and Middler, Skyler and Brubaker, Jed R. and Fiesler, Casey
Proc. ACM Hum.-Comput. Interact. 3, CSCW: Article 55
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- DOI: 10.1145/3359157
Reddit Rules! Characterizing an Ecosystem of Governance Fiesler, Casey and Jiang, Jialun "Aaron" and McCann, Joshua and Frye, Kyle and Brubaker, Jed
Proceedings of the Twelfth International Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM-2018)
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The social sharing and news aggregation site Reddit provides a unique example of an ecosystem of community-created rules. Not only do individual subreddits create and enforce their own regulations, but site-wide guidelines and norms may also influence behavior. This paper reports on a mixed-methods study of 100,000 subreddits and their rules. Our findings characterize the types of rules across Reddit, the frequency of rules at scale, and patterns of rules based on subreddit characteristics. We find that rules appear to be context-dependent for individual subreddits but also share common characteristics across the site. Taken together, our findings provide a rich description of this ecosystem of rules, motivating further inquiry into underlying mechanisms for rule formation and enforcement in online communities.