Unveiling Scaling Laws in the Regulatory Functions of Reddit
Shambhobi Bhattacharya, Jisung Yoon, Hyejin Youn

TL;DR
This paper uncovers universal scaling laws in Reddit's moderation activities, revealing how regulatory efforts grow with community size and highlighting the balance between automated and human moderation.
Contribution
It provides the first comprehensive analysis of how regulatory functions scale in online communities, identifying universal patterns and the interplay between different moderation mechanisms.
Findings
Moderator actions grow superlinearly with community size
Bot enforcement scales slightly sublinearly, indicating slower growth
Proactive moderation correlates with reduced user engagement
Abstract
Online platforms like Reddit, Wikipedia, and Facebook are integral to modern life, enabling content creation and sharing through posts, comments, and discussions. Despite their virtual and often anonymous nature, these platforms need rules and oversight to maintain a safe and productive environment. As these communities grow, a key question arises: how does the need for regulatory functions scale? Do larger groups require more regulatory actions and oversight per person, or can they manage with less? Our analysis of Reddit's regulatory functions reveals robust scaling relationships across different subreddits, suggesting universal patterns between community size and the amount of regulation needed. We found that the number of comments and moderator actions, such as comment removals, grew faster than the community size, with superlinear exponents of 1.12 and 1.18, respectively. However,…
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Taxonomy
TopicsSpam and Phishing Detection · Information and Cyber Security
