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.
The governance and moderation of online communities has become 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 (Wang et al.; Zhu, Kraut, et al.), but these perspectives have yet to address how governance and moderation impact online communities as a result of overlapping membership and activity. We propose a study of moderation in online communities that overlap on two different platforms to reveal the challenges of cross-platform governance and extend ecological understandings about the organization of online communities.
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
References
- ↑ Kraut et al., Building Successful Online Communities: Evidence-Based Social Design, MIT Press, 2012
- ↑ 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
