Unveiling Scaling Laws in the Regulatory Functions of Reddit

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, bot-based rule enforcement did not keep pace with community growth, exhibiting a slightly sublinear exponent of 0.95. Further analysis of the residuals from these scaling behaviors identified a 'trade-off axis,' where one-way coordination mechanisms (bots and moderators) counteract two-way interactions (comments) and vice versa. Our findings suggest that a more proactive moderation approach, characterized by increased bot activity and moderator comment removals, tends to result in less user engagement under the scaling framework. Understanding these natural scaling patterns and interactions can help platform administrators and policymakers foster healthy online communities while mitigating harmful behaviors such as harassment, doxxing, and misinformation. Without proper regulation, these negative behaviors can proliferate and cause significant damage. Targeted interventions based on these insights are key to ensuring online platforms remain safe and beneficial spaces.