All That's Happening behind the Scenes: Putting the Spotlight on Volunteer Moderator Labor in Reddit
Hanlin Li, Brent Hecht, Stevie Chancellor

TL;DR
This study quantitatively analyzes both visible and invisible moderator actions on Reddit, revealing significant underestimation of moderation labor when only visible actions are considered, highlighting the need for better support and understanding of volunteer moderator work.
Contribution
It introduces a unique dataset of private moderator logs and demonstrates the heterogeneity and extent of moderation work beyond visible actions on Reddit.
Findings
Visible moderation work underestimates total moderator effort
Moderation activity varies significantly across communities and moderators
Invisible moderator actions constitute a substantial portion of total moderation labor
Abstract
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 favor revenue generation and user engagement, moderators are under-supported to manage the expansion of online communities. To preserve these online communities, developers and researchers of social platforms must account for and support as much of this labor as possible. In this paper, we quantitatively characterize the publicly visible and invisible actions taken by moderators on Reddit, using a unique dataset of private moderator logs for 126 subreddits and over 900 moderators. Our analysis of this dataset reveals the heterogeneity of moderation work across both communities and moderators. Moreover, we find that analyzing only visible work - the…
Peer Reviews
No public reviews on file for this paper yet. If you reviewed it on a platform where reviews are public (OpenReview, ICLR, NeurIPS, ICML), you can paste yours below so the community can read it here.
Videos
No videos yet. Explain this paper in a talk, walkthrough, or lecture? Add one.
Taxonomy
TopicsHate Speech and Cyberbullying Detection
