Trajectories of Blocked Community Members: Redemption, Recidivism and Departure

Abstract

Community norm violations can impair constructive communication and collaboration online. As a defense mechanism, community moderators often address such transgressions by temporarily blocking the perpetrator. Such actions, however, come with the cost of potentially alienating community members. Given this tradeoff, it is essential to understand to what extent, and in which situations, this common moderation practice is effective in reinforcing community rules.In this work, we introduce a computational framework for studying the future behavior of blocked users on Wikipedia. After their block expires, they can take several distinct paths: they can reform and adhere to the rules, but they can also recidivate, or straight-out abandon the community. We reveal that these trajectories are tied to factors rooted both in the characteristics of the blocked individual and in whether they perceived the block to be fair and justified. Based on these insights, we formulate a series of prediction tasks aiming to determine which of these paths a user is likely to take after being blocked for their first offense, and demonstrate the feasibility of these new tasks. Overall, this work builds towards a more nuanced approach to moderation by highlighting the tradeoffs that are in play.

Content Removal as a Moderation Strategy

“…Cheng et al [8]'s social-feedback experiments, mentioned above, demonstrate increased commenting rates after receiving low community evaluations, an observation that supports H-Engagement. However, the temporary-ban study by Chang and Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil [5] on Wikipedia found no significant change in future activity rate.…”

“…CMV provides a detailed description of moderation standards and practices through a wiki page that is visible to all users 5 . A comment may be removed by a moderator if it is considered to violate one or more rules, such as by being rude or hostile, not challenging the original post, or violating any Reddit site-wide policy.…”

“…It should be noted these users constitute a relatively high-activity subset of users with respect to the pre-removal window 5. https://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/wiki/modstandards 6.…”

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

“…Recent work of volunteer moderators and moderation mainly focuses on user-governed platforms such as Wikipedia [11,33], and Reddit [9,16,29]. Twitch, as a user-moderated, live-streaming community, is similar in some governance aspects to other online communities such as Reddit, which is a self-reliant community [29], and Facebook Group, which provides multiparty interactions [51].…”

A quantitative exploration of repeated advice-seeking on Reddit's r/relationships

“…This sampling decision was similar to that used in other studies to control for the effects of previous experiences when examining longitudinal user behaviour (e.g. Chang & Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil, 2019). This decision was bolstered by past studies which have found that prior postings on a community already strongly predict future postings on the same community (e.g.…”