@inproceedings{8875dcba226b41c4a7a7fabc29dfd655,
title = "Evolution of Rules in Reddit Communities",
abstract = "Reddit communities (subreddits) govern themselves through rules. Existing work does not study how rules change within a subreddit, and when different types of rules are added since subreddit creation. As current datasets lack information about subreddits' past rules, we present an approach to get all rules in the history of a subreddit using the Wayback Machine, and study rule trajectories within 496 subreddits. We find that at least 50% of the first rule additions occurred in less than a year from subreddit creation. Rules about civility and relevance are most common in the first rules. In contrast, rules that prohibit certain content are frequently added over time. Studying rule trajectories can help us answer whether early rule establishment helps with community success, improving key factors like user retention, norm compliance, and overall desirable behavior within the subreddit.",
keywords = "content moderation, online governance, rule changes, rule creation",
author = "Harita Reddy and Eshwar Chandrasekharan",
note = "Publisher Copyright: {\textcopyright} 2023 ACM.; 26th ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing, CSCW 2023 ; Conference date: 14-10-2023 Through 18-10-2023",
year = "2023",
month = oct,
day = "14",
doi = "10.1145/3584931.3606973",
language = "English (US)",
series = "Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work, CSCW",
publisher = "Association for Computing Machinery",
pages = "278--282",
editor = "Morgan Ames and Susan Fussell and Eric Gilbert and Vera Liao and Xiaojuan Ma and Xinru Page and Mark Rouncefield and Vivek Singh and Pamela Wisniewski",
booktitle = "CSCW 2023 Companion - Conference Companion Publication of the 2023 Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing",
address = "United States",
}