Online moderation
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.
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?
Our prior work 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 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: Surviving an "Eternal September": How an Online Community Managed a Surge of Newcomers
