Moderation Visibility: Mapping the Strategies of Volunteer Moderators in Live Streaming Micro Communities

Abstract

Volunteer moderators actively engage in online content management, such as removing toxic content and sanctioning anti-normative behaviors in user-governed communities. The synchronicity and ephemerality of live-streaming communities pose unique moderation challenges. Based on interviews with 21 volunteer moderators on Twitch, we mapped out 13 moderation strategies and presented them in relation to the bad act, enabling us to categorize from proactive and reactive perspectives and identify communicative and technical interventions. We found that the act of moderation involves highly visible and performative activities in the chat and invisible activities involving coordination and sanction. The juxtaposition of real-time individual decision-making with collaborative discussions and the dual nature of visible and invisible activities of moderators provide a unique lens into a role that relies heavily on both the social and technical. We also discuss how the afordances of live-streaming contribute to these unique activities. CCS CONCEPTS• Human-centered computing → Empirical studies in collaborative and social computing; Empirical studies in HCI .

Coordination and Collaboration: How do Volunteer Moderators Work as a Team in Live Streaming Communities?

“…A group of research involving volunteer mods often treats them as individual entities to conduct the moderation practices, such as the moderation tools they have used [7,35] and the different roles they have played in the community [55,59,70]. These roles involve various tasks and moderation strategies, such as helping the streamer to manage viewers [71] and communicating with violators [9].…”

“…The application of moderation strategies and doing tasks requires much communication and coordination. Though some work points out the discussion among other mods or the admin (e.g., [9,61]), there is a lack of work to investigate mods collaboration and coordination mechanism. This work extends existent research in volunteer moderation regarding mods' individual decision-making to the collective decision-making process for two reasons.…”

“…In online communities applying volunteer moderation, norms vary across micro-communities, different from guidelines and terms of service aggregated by the platform and applied to all stakeholders. Much work has explored norms' impact on user's perceptions and behaviors, such as setting a good interaction example [60] and clarifying norms [9,36] to mitigate harassment behaviors.…”

“…Given that many platforms heavily rely on human mods who are voluntary to support their communities like Twitch [61,70], it is essential to understand how these volunteer mods collaborate as a team, which has been by large overlooked with many HCI scholarships focusing only on the labor aspect [16], mods' decision-making process [8,9] and engagement [61,70], and the moderation challenges [37]. Volunteer mods are not professional employees with good training and moderate content in an informal manner.…”

After Violation But Before Sanction: Understanding Volunteer Moderators' Profiling Processes Toward Violators in Live Streaming Communities

“…Kiene et al [47] also found that the moderation tools are insufficient for organizing and retrieving information for mods to make consistent decisions towards violations and that mods seek user-developed bots to track information of community members. Research in live streaming communities shows that some mods use moderation tools to check a viewer's history [7] but are not satisfied with the features of these tools and hope to have more information about viewers and violators [5]. While this thread of research discusses the need and necessity of more evidence for moderation, they do not specify what type of evidence they need, how they collect the evidence, and consequently, how to use these shreds of evidence to evaluate potential violations and punish potential violators.…”