TY - GEN
T1 - Community Resilience
T2 - 2022 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, CHI EA 2022
AU - Chan, Jackie
AU - Atreyasa, Aditi
AU - Chancellor, Stevie
AU - Chandrasekharan, Eshwar
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2022 ACM.
PY - 2022/4/27
Y1 - 2022/4/27
N2 - Online communities often experience some form of crisis. Regardless of whether these communities are small groups or entire platforms, the ability to handle disruptions during volatile periods signifies the resilience of a community. In this paper, we analyze the effects of a specific type of crisis event on Reddit: sudden spikes in attention received by a community due to a post from the subreddit hitting r/popular-the default feed that aggregates the most popular content on Reddit. Our results show that r/popular is a source of potential disruptions due to the higher number of comments, authors, and especially removed comments found compared to threads that do not reach r/popular. When looking at r/popular's effects across subreddits, large communities' commenting and posting behaviors were less impacted by r/popular threads compared to smaller communities. However, similar-sized subreddits had substantial variations in how their commenting and posting activities were influenced by an r/popular thread. Understanding the causal factors behind these differences has implications for online governance, as well as fostering resilient and healthy communities.
AB - Online communities often experience some form of crisis. Regardless of whether these communities are small groups or entire platforms, the ability to handle disruptions during volatile periods signifies the resilience of a community. In this paper, we analyze the effects of a specific type of crisis event on Reddit: sudden spikes in attention received by a community due to a post from the subreddit hitting r/popular-the default feed that aggregates the most popular content on Reddit. Our results show that r/popular is a source of potential disruptions due to the higher number of comments, authors, and especially removed comments found compared to threads that do not reach r/popular. When looking at r/popular's effects across subreddits, large communities' commenting and posting behaviors were less impacted by r/popular threads compared to smaller communities. However, similar-sized subreddits had substantial variations in how their commenting and posting activities were influenced by an r/popular thread. Understanding the causal factors behind these differences has implications for online governance, as well as fostering resilient and healthy communities.
KW - Reddit
KW - moderation
KW - online communities
KW - resilience
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85129726036&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=85129726036&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1145/3491101.3519813
DO - 10.1145/3491101.3519813
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:85129726036
T3 - Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems - Proceedings
BT - CHI 2022 - Extended Abstracts of the 2022 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
PB - Association for Computing Machinery
Y2 - 30 April 2022 through 5 May 2022
ER -