Online moderation: Difference between revisions

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We are looking for people interested in participating in this study! If you are over 18 years old, are a moderator for an online community, and can conduct an interview in English, please see the link for the Google Form Questionnaire below. We would love to talk to you and learn more about your moderation work. You will receive a $20 Amazon gift card in return for your participation.
We are looking for people interested in participating in this study! Participants must be adults (i.e., at least 18 years old if they are from the United States and/or above the age of majority in their locale if they are not) and can conduct an interview in English, please see the link for the Google Form Questionnaire below. We would love to talk to you and learn more about your moderation work. You will receive a $20 gift card in return for your participation.


[http://bit.ly/2GgpR5k Google Form Questionnaire]
[http://bit.ly/2GgpR5k Google Form Questionnaire]


As Bob Kraut and Paul Resnick have argued in their seminal book about 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?
Research in governance and moderation of online communities has grown increasingly complex as the technological affordances of platforms evolve along larger social trends. While experts initially regarded moderation as one of the most important factors that make online communities successful <ref name = "BSOC">, Kraut et al., [https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2207798 Building Successful Online Communities: Evidence-Based Social Design], MIT Press, 2012</ref>, newer theories of the governance of platforms suggest that the way online communities are moderated also constitute their identity and its standards for participatory experience <ref name = "custodians">Gillespie, Tarleton, [https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300173130/custodians-internet  Custodians of the Internet Platforms, Content Moderation, and the Hidden Decisions That Shape Social Media], Yale University Press, 2018</ref>. Adding further complexity to our understandings of online communities are ecological perspectives of overlap and competition between platforms and communities within online ecosystems<ref name = "BSOC"></ref><ref name = "wang"> Wang, Xiaoqing, et al, [https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.1120.0756 The Impact of Membership Overlap on Growth: An Ecological Competition View of Online Groups], ''Organization Science'', Vol. 24, No. 2, 2013</ref>, but these perspectives have yet to address how governance and moderation impact online communities as a result of overlapping membership and activity. This study investigates moderation in online communities that overlap on two different platforms to reveal the challenges of cross-platform governance and extend understandings on membership overlap and the ecosystems of online communities.


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.
Our prior work<ref name = "eternal">Kiene, et al., [https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2858356 Surviving an "Eternal September": How an Online Community Managed a Surge of Newcomers], ''Proceedings of the 2016 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems'', ACM, 2016</ref> includes interviews with subreddit moderators to investigate how one popular subreddit managed a massive inundation of newcomers. We found that through a well organized moderation team and the use of platform technological affordances, the community was able to withstand membership growth of ~200,000 to over 3 million users in little over a year. This study later motivated a quantitative project<ref name = "bettersmaller">Lin et al., [https://aaai.org/ocs/index.php/ICWSM/ICWSM17/paper/view/15628 Better When It Was Smaller? Community Content and Behavior After Massive Growth], ''Eleventh International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media'', AAAI Publications, 2017</ref> led by computer scientists at Stanford University who analyzed the effects of massive newcomer growth on the quality of posts across multiple other communities on Reddit that experienced similar growth (through becoming default subreddits).
 
Further inquiry into the organization of online community moderation is needed to describe this kind of volunteer moderation work across different types of platforms as well as moderation of communities that exist on multiple platforms (like a community on Reddit that has also uses a Discord server for organization and social interaction).
 
===Previous work:===
[https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2858356 Surviving an "Eternal September": How an Online Community Managed a Surge of Newcomers]
 
= References =

Latest revision as of 16:05, 25 August 2019

We are looking for people interested in participating in this study! Participants must be adults (i.e., at least 18 years old if they are from the United States and/or above the age of majority in their locale if they are not) and can conduct an interview in English, please see the link for the Google Form Questionnaire below. We would love to talk to you and learn more about your moderation work. You will receive a $20 gift card in return for your participation.

Google Form Questionnaire

Research in governance and moderation of online communities has grown increasingly complex as the technological affordances of platforms evolve along larger social trends. While experts initially regarded moderation as one of the most important factors that make online communities successful [1], newer theories of the governance of platforms suggest that the way online communities are moderated also constitute their identity and its standards for participatory experience [2]. Adding further complexity to our understandings of online communities are ecological perspectives of overlap and competition between platforms and communities within online ecosystems[1][3], but these perspectives have yet to address how governance and moderation impact online communities as a result of overlapping membership and activity. This study investigates moderation in online communities that overlap on two different platforms to reveal the challenges of cross-platform governance and extend understandings on membership overlap and the ecosystems of online communities.

Our prior work[4] includes interviews with subreddit moderators to investigate how one popular subreddit managed a massive inundation of newcomers. We found that through a well organized moderation team and the use of platform technological affordances, the community was able to withstand membership growth of ~200,000 to over 3 million users in little over a year. This study later motivated a quantitative project[5] led by computer scientists at Stanford University who analyzed the effects of massive newcomer growth on the quality of posts across multiple other communities on Reddit that experienced similar growth (through becoming default subreddits).

Further inquiry into the organization of online community moderation is needed to describe this kind of volunteer moderation work across different types of platforms as well as moderation of communities that exist on multiple platforms (like a community on Reddit that has also uses a Discord server for organization and social interaction).

Previous work:[edit]

Surviving an "Eternal September": How an Online Community Managed a Surge of Newcomers

References[edit]

  1. 1.0 1.1 , Kraut et al., Building Successful Online Communities: Evidence-Based Social Design, MIT Press, 2012
  2. Gillespie, Tarleton, Custodians of the Internet Platforms, Content Moderation, and the Hidden Decisions That Shape Social Media, Yale University Press, 2018
  3. Wang, Xiaoqing, et al, The Impact of Membership Overlap on Growth: An Ecological Competition View of Online Groups, Organization Science, Vol. 24, No. 2, 2013
  4. Kiene, et al., Surviving an "Eternal September": How an Online Community Managed a Surge of Newcomers, Proceedings of the 2016 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, ACM, 2016
  5. Lin et al., Better When It Was Smaller? Community Content and Behavior After Massive Growth, Eleventh International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media, AAAI Publications, 2017