Perceptions of Moderators as a Large-Scale Measure of Online Community Governance
Galen Weld, Leon Leibmann, Amy X. Zhang, Tim Althoff

TL;DR
This study analyzes how community members perceive moderators on reddit by classifying sentiment in millions of posts, revealing strategies linked to positive perceptions and the importance of moderator activity.
Contribution
It introduces a large-scale sentiment analysis of community perceptions of moderators, linking perceptions to governance practices and moderator characteristics.
Findings
Strict enforcement correlates with positive perceptions in certain communities.
Active community members as moderators are viewed more favorably.
Perceptions vary significantly across different community types.
Abstract
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 regularly make decisions about how to govern, yet measuring the 'success' of governance is complex and nuanced, making it challenging to determine what governance strategies are most successful. Furthermore, prior work has shown that communities have differing values, suggesting that 'one-size-fits-all' approaches to governance are unlikely to serve all communities well. In this work, we assess governance practices on reddit by classifying the sentiment of community members' public discussion of their own moderators. We label 1.89 million posts and comments made on reddit over an 18 month period. We relate these perceptions to characteristics of community…
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
TopicsKnowledge Management and Sharing
