Related papers: The Relational Origins of Rules in Online Communit…
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,…
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…
Developing a strong community requires empowered leadership capable of overcoming governance challenges. New online platforms have given users opportunities to practice governance through content moderation roles. The over 2.8 million…
Loyalty is an essential component of multi-community engagement. When users have the choice to engage with a variety of different communities, they often become loyal to just one, focusing on that community at the expense of others.…
Social influence drives both offline and online human behaviour. It pervades cultural markets, and manifests itself in the adoption of scientific and technical innovations as well as the spread of social practices. Prior empirical work on…
How are Reddit communities responding to AI-generated content? We explored this question through a large-scale analysis of subreddit community rules and their change over time. We collected the metadata and community rules for over…
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.…
Understanding online communities requires an appreciation of both structure and culture. But basic questions remain difficult to pose. How do these facets interact and drive each other? Using data on the membership and governance styles of…
Social norms have traditionally been difficult to quantify. In any particular society, their sheer number and complex interdependencies often limit a system-level analysis. One exception is that of the network of norms that sustain the…
We study the impact of content moderation policies in online communities. In our theoretical model, a platform chooses a content moderation policy and individuals choose whether or not to participate in the community according to the…
Millions of people use online social networks to reinforce their sense of belonging, for example by giving and asking for feedback as a form of social validation and self-recognition. It is common to observe disagreement among people…
Social structures emerge as a result of individuals managing a variety of different of social relationships. Societies can be represented as highly structured dynamic multiplex networks. Here we study the dynamical origins of the specific…
Cooperative behavior in real social dilemmas is often perceived as a phenomenon emerging from norms and punishment. To overcome this paradigm, we highlight the interplay between the influence of social networks on individuals, and the…
Institutions and cultures evolve adaptively in response to the current environmental incentives, usually. But sometimes institutional change is due to stochastic drives beyond current fitness, including drift, path dependency, blind…
The software behind online community platforms encodes a governance model that represents a strikingly narrow set of governance possibilities focused on moderators and administrators. When online communities desire other forms of…
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…
The influence of the social relationships of an individual on the individual's opinions (about a topic, a product, or whatever else) is a well known phenomenon and it has been widely studied. This paper considers a network of positive (i.e.…
In many online communities, community leaders (i.e., moderators and administrators) can proactively filter undesired content by requiring posts to be approved before publication. But although many communities adopt post approvals, there has…
We investigate two paradigms for studying the evolution of cooperation--Prisoner's Dilemma and Snowdrift game in an online friendship network obtained from a social networking site. We demonstrate that such social network has small-world…