Admins, mods, and benevolent dictators for life: The implicit feudalism of online communities

Schneider, Nathan

doi:10.1177/1461444820986553

Cited by 32 publications

(18 citation statements)

References 42 publications

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“…Thus far, the prevailing governance logic in software peer production has been along the lines of the "benevolent dictator for life," as Linux's Linus Torvalds is commonly described (Schneider 2021). An "Open Governance Index" found a severe lack of inclusive processes guiding major Open Source projects (Laffan 2012).…”

Section: Conclusion: From Tyranny To Commonsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Tyranny of openness: what happened to peer production?

Schneider

2021

Feminist Media Studies

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This paper examines a "culture war" underway among software peer-production communities through relevant blog posts, legal documents, forum discussions, and other sources. Software licensing has been a defining strategy for peer producers, and much of the conflict at hand revolves around whether licensing should more fully incorporate ethics and economics, respectively. Feminist analysis can aid in tracing the contours of discontent through its emphasis on social processes that enable and infuse productive activity-processes that peer producers have trained themselves to ignore. The emerging critiques, and the experiments they have inspired, gesture toward fuller understandings of what "free" and "open" might mean.

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Section: Conclusion: From Tyranny To Commonsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Tyranny of openness: what happened to peer production?

Schneider

2021

Feminist Media Studies

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“…Despite early visions of the social web as an open and participatory space [3], the first online communities were governed as technocratic autocracies, primarily due to the need for an "admin" with technical skills to own and operate the server that the community software ran on [65]. While admins sometimes chose to carry out governance that was closer to anarchy or democracy in practice [11,55], admins still had the ultimate authority to shut down the server or kick users out.…”

Section: Background and Motivationmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Today, this governance is predominantly expressed as a model consisting of roles and permissions, where groups such as administrators and moderators have broad privileges over regular users. This roles-and-permissions model has its roots in the UNIX file permissions model developed nearly fifty years ago [65], and it is a model now enshrined within the software of almost all major community platforms.…”

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confidence: 99%

PolicyKit: Building Governance in Online Communities

Zhang

Hugh

Bernstein

2020

Proceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology

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The software behind online community platforms encodes a governance model that represents a strikingly narrow set of governance possibilities focused on moderators and administrators. When online communities desire other forms of government, such as ones that take many members' opinions into account or that distribute power in non-trivial ways, communities must resort to laborious manual effort. In this paper, we present PolicyKit, a software infrastructure that empowers online community members to concisely author a wide range of governance procedures and automatically carry out those procedures on their home platforms. We draw on political science theory to encode community governance into policies, or short imperative functions that specify a procedure for determining whether a user-initiated action can execute. Actions that can be governed by policies encompass everyday activities such as posting or moderating a message, but actions can also encompass changes to the policies themselves, enabling the evolution of governance over time. We demonstrate the expressivity of PolicyKit through implementations of governance models such as a random jury deliberation, a multi-stage caucus, a reputation system, and a promotion procedure inspired by Wikipedia's Request for Adminship (RfA) process. CCS Concepts •Human-centered computing → Collaborative and social computing systems and tools;

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“…Roberts, 2019), and the ways in which platform users by accident or design moderate one another (e.g. Matias, 2019;Schneider, 2021).In our paper we address a different question: where is content moderation? We approach this broad question by focusing on localized social media -an area which remains under-researched (though see e.g., Miller, 2016) -summarizing early results from in-depth interviews with the content moderators of 12 place-named Facebook groups across Greater London, UK.…”

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confidence: 99%

“…Roberts, 2019), and the ways in which platform users by accident or design moderate one another (e.g. Matias, 2019;Schneider, 2021).…”

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confidence: 99%

Localizing Content Moderation: Approaching the Orientational Spaces Of Facebook Group Admins and Mods

Rodgers

McLoughlin

Ballatore

et al. 2021

SPIR

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This paper contributes to the burgeoning literature on content moderation by focusing on its practice in relation to localized social media contexts, an area which remains under-researched. It makes two key contributions. Firstly, it presents the results of a study on moderation practices in relation to place-named Facebook groups across Greater London. Drawing on in-depth interviews with administrators and moderators from 16 Facebook groups, we focus on exploring how such administrators and moderators negotiate an apparent ‘orientational’ tension between ‘translocality’ and ‘locality’. On the one hand, we explore how administrators and moderators oriented partly to what might be understood as the 'translocal' space of Facebook as a platform. On the other hand, we also sought to understand how such administrators and moderators orient to the localised situation surrounding the place-named Facebook group. Our second key contribution aligns with the conference theme on co-dependence and social media, outlining a conceptual approach for researching the geographical contexts or ‘place’ of content moderation more broadly. We emphasize the inherent, practical locality of content moderation. Drawing on a long tradition of relational approaches in human geography, cultural anthropology and philosophy, we conceptualize ‘locality’ as something produced through practical action, rather being pre-given, specific geographical locations. Approaching the place or context of content moderation relationally, rather than via geographical scales such as local or global, might not only provide a more context sensitive approach, but also, underline the limits of large-scale moderation, whether by platforms or governments, or through human or algorithmic interventions.

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Admins, mods, and benevolent dictators for life: The implicit feudalism of online communities

Cited by 32 publications

References 42 publications

The Tyranny of openness: what happened to peer production?

The Tyranny of openness: what happened to peer production?

PolicyKit: Building Governance in Online Communities

Localizing Content Moderation: Approaching the Orientational Spaces Of Facebook Group Admins and Mods

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