Values, ethics and participatory policymaking in online communities

Centivany, Alissa

doi:10.1002/pra2.2016.14505301058

Cited by 9 publications

(8 citation statements)

References 24 publications

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“…Another important next step for this work would be to delve into the hows and whys of rule formation by talking to subreddit moderators, in the tradition of prior work that has examined moderation practices on Reddit (Massanari 2015;Matias 2016a;Centivany and Glushko 2016;Centivany 2016;Mills 2017). Our findings support the idea that moderators of individual subreddits have a great deal of influence over the culture of the small communities they lead.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 63%

“…These processes (though often overlooked) are embedded in the fabric of collaborative environments, and arguably should be considered alongside design and practice when creating and studying systems (Jackson, Gillespie, and Payette 2014;Centivany and Glushko 2016). Policy also plays an important role in translating community values into user interaction (Centivany 2016).…”

Section: Background and Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Reddit's aggregation and algorithms have the ability to suppress or highlight certain types of content, and there is particular power to visibility, such as a subreddit becoming a "default" on the main page. This is one reason why default subreddits can have a disproportionate impact on Reddit culture overall (Centivany 2016).…”

Section: Background and Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Reddit Rules! Characterizing an Ecosystem of Governance

Fiesler

Jiang

McCann

et al. 2018

ICWSM

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The social sharing and news aggregation site Reddit provides a unique example of an ecosystem of community-created rules. Not only do individual subreddits create and enforce their own regulations, but site-wide guidelines and norms may also influence behavior. This paper reports on a mixed-methods study of 100,000 subreddits and their rules. Our findings characterize the types of rules across Reddit, the frequency of rules at scale, and patterns of rules based on subreddit characteristics. We find that rules appear to be context-dependent for individual subreddits but also share common characteristics across the site. Taken together, our findings provide a rich description of this ecosystem of rules, motivating further inquiry into underlying mechanisms for rule formation and enforcement in online communities.

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 63%

Section: Background and Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Background and Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Reddit Rules! Characterizing an Ecosystem of Governance

Fiesler

Jiang

McCann

et al. 2018

ICWSM

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“…This level of self-efficacy can be highly motivating for moderators [60,61], but also results in additional work as moderators negotiate norms and ideals, such as democracy and meritocracy, with their role as the arbiter of their community. In spaces that value democracy and meritocracy, moderators may struggle with their role as oligarchs, where ultimately, they, rather than community members, wield control [11,50,65,66]. In addition to these struggles about their identity, volunteer moderators also engage with the demands of community members, platforms, and each other [53], which Matias [49][50][51] describes as "civic labor."…”

Section: Volunteer Moderationmentioning

confidence: 99%

"I run the world's largest historical outreach project and it's on a cesspool of a website." Moderating a Public Scholarship Site on Reddit: A Case Study of r/AskHistorians

Gilbert

2020

Proc. ACM Hum.-Comput. Interact.

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Online communities provide important functions in their participants' lives, from providing spaces to discuss topics of interest to supporting the development of close, personal relationships. Volunteer moderators play key roles in maintaining these spaces, such as creating and enforcing rules and modeling normative behavior. While these users play important governance roles in online spaces, less is known about how the work they do is impacted by platform design and culture. r/AskHistorians, a Reddit-based question and answer forum dedicated to providing users with academic-level answers to questions about history provides an interesting case study on the impact of design and culture because of its unique rules and their strict enforcement by moderators. In this article I use interviews with r/AskHistorians moderators and community members, observation, and the full comment log of a highly upvoted thread to describe the impact of Reddit's design and culture on moderation work. Results show that visible moderation work that is often interpreted as censorship, and the default masculine whiteness of Reddit, create challenges for moderators who use the subreddit as a public history site. Nonetheless, r/AskHistorians moderators have carved a space on Reddit where, through their public scholarship work, the community serves as a model for combating misinformation by building trust in academic processes. CCS Concepts: • Human-centered computing → Computer supported cooperative work.

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“…There have been numerous examples of Reddit's moderation decisions being driven by media pressure including r/The_Donald which was only shutdown after widespread reporting in the media for the violent and incivil political discourse it facilitated, r/TheFappening which was shutdown only after reports of its role as the facilitator in the distribution of involuntary pornography involving celebrities, r/-CoonTown which was not banned during Reddit's first purge of 'hateful' subreddits until criticism from mainstream media outlets, and most notably -r/jailbait. The r/jailbait subreddit was one of the earliest cases of Reddit moderation being performed only in reaction to media attention (Centivany 2016). The subreddit featured provocative pictures of minors and due to the lack of any rules against it, Reddit condoned its existence even awarding it the voted best subreddit of 2008 (Chen 2012).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Exploring the Magnitude and Effects of Media Influence on Reddit Moderation

Habib

Nithyanand

2022

ICWSM

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Most platforms, including Reddit, face a dilemma when applying interventions such as subreddit bans to toxic communities — do they risk angering their user base by proactively enforcing stricter controls on discourse or do they defer interventions at the risk of eventually triggering negative media reactions which might impact their advertising revenue? In this paper, we analyze Reddit’s previous administrative interventions to understand one aspect of this dilemma: the relationship between the media and administrative interventions. More specifically, we make two primary contributions. First, using a mediation analysis framework, we find evidence that Reddit’s interventions for violating their content policy for toxic content occur because of media pressure. Second, using interrupted time series analysis, we show that media attention on communities with toxic content only increases the problematic behavior associated with that community (both within the community itself and across the platform). However, we find no significant difference in the impact of administrative interventions on subreddits with and without media pressure. Taken all together, this study provides evidence of a media-driven moderation strategy at Reddit and also suggests that such a strategy may not have a significantly different impact than a more proactive strategy.

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Values, ethics and participatory policymaking in online communities

Cited by 9 publications

References 24 publications

Reddit Rules! Characterizing an Ecosystem of Governance

Reddit Rules! Characterizing an Ecosystem of Governance

"I run the world's largest historical outreach project and it's on a cesspool of a website." Moderating a Public Scholarship Site on Reddit: A Case Study of r/AskHistorians

Exploring the Magnitude and Effects of Media Influence on Reddit Moderation

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