Related papers: Governing for Free: Rule Process Effects on Reddit…
Millions of online communities are governed by volunteer moderators, who shape their communities by setting and enforcing rules, recruiting additional moderators, and participating in the community themselves. These moderators must…
Rules are a critical component of the functioning of nearly every online community, yet it is challenging for community moderators to make data-driven decisions about what rules to set for their communities. The connection between a…
Community rules play a key part in enabling or constraining the behaviors of members in online communities. However, little is unknown regarding whether and to what degree changing rules actually affects community dynamics. In this paper,…
Online volunteers are an uncompensated yet valuable labor force for many social platforms. For example, volunteer content moderators perform a vast amount of labor to maintain online communities. However, as social platforms like Reddit…
Online platforms like Reddit, Wikipedia, and Facebook are integral to modern life, enabling content creation and sharing through posts, comments, and discussions. Despite their virtual and often anonymous nature, these platforms need rules…
Effective content moderation in online communities is often a delicate balance between maintaining content quality and fostering user participation. In this paper, we introduce post guidance, a novel approach to community moderation that…
Reddit relies on volunteer moderators to enforce community rules, configure tools, and review flagged content. This labor is substantial, worth millions in unpaid effort, and increasingly hard to sustain as communities grow. While recent…
Most platforms, including Reddit, face a dilemma when applying interventions such as subreddit bans to toxic communities -- do they risk angering their user base by proactively enforcing stricter controls on discourse or do they defer…
Online communities are constantly growing, with dozens of platforms housing millions of users. Large and small communities alike rely on volunteer moderators to maintain order. Despite their key role, moderators are given a toolbox of…
Reddit administrators have generally struggled to prevent or contain such discourse for several reasons including: (1) the inability for a handful of human administrators to track and react to millions of posts and comments per day and (2)…
Making online social communities 'better' is a challenging undertaking, as online communities are extraordinarily varied in their size, topical focus, and governance. As such, what is valued by one community may not be valued by another.…
As more people flock to social media to connect with others and form virtual communities, it is important to research how members of these groups interact to understand human behavior on the Web. In response to an increase in hate speech,…
Social media platform design often incorporates explicit signals of positive feedback. Some moderators provide positive feedback with the goal of positive reinforcement, but are often unsure of their ability to actually influence user…
Online communities offer their members various benefits, such as information access, social and emotional support, and entertainment. Despite the important role that founders play in shaping communities, prior research has focused primarily…
Volunteer moderators play a crucial role in sustaining online dialogue, but they often disagree about what should or should not be allowed. In this paper, we study the complexity of content moderation with a focus on disagreements between…
On Reddit, the moderation queue (modqueue) is a primary interface for moderators to review reported content. Despite its central role in Reddit's community-reliant moderation model, little is known about how moderators actually use it in…
Content moderation is the process of flagging content based on pre-defined platform rules. There has been a growing need for AI moderators to safeguard users as well as protect the mental health of human moderators from traumatic content.…
As content moderation becomes a central aspect of all social media platforms and online communities, interest has grown in how to make moderation decisions contestable. On social media platforms where individual communities moderate their…
Anti-social behaviors in social media can happen both at user and community levels. While a great deal of attention is on the individual as an 'aggressor,' the banning of entire Reddit subcommunities (i.e., subreddits) demonstrates that…
Reddit has found its communities playing a prominent role in originating and propagating problematic socio-political discourse. Reddit administrators have generally struggled to prevent or contain such discourse for several reasons…