TY - JOUR
T1 - The Internet’s hidden rules
T2 - An empirical study of Reddit norm violations at micro, meso, and macro scales
AU - Chandrasekharan, Eshwar
AU - Samory, Mattia
AU - Jhaver, Shagun
AU - Charvat, Hunter
AU - Bruckman, Amy
AU - Lampe, Cliff
AU - Eisenstein, Jacob
AU - Gilbert, Eric
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2018 Copyright held by the owner/author(s). Publication rights licensed to the Association for Computing Machinery.
PY - 2018/11
Y1 - 2018/11
N2 - Norms are central to how online communities are governed. Yet, norms are also emergent, arise from interaction, and can vary significantly between communities—making them challenging to study at scale. In this paper, we study community norms on Reddit in a large-scale, empirical manner. Via 2.8M comments removed by moderators of 100 top subreddits over 10 months, we use both computational and qualitative methods to identify three types of norms: Macro norms that are universal to most parts of Reddit; meso norms that are shared across certain groups of subreddits; and micro norms that are specific to individual, relatively unique subreddits. Given the size of Reddit’s user base—and the wide range of topics covered by different subreddits—we argue this represents the first large-scale study of norms across disparate online communities. In other words, these findings shed light on what Reddit values, and how widely-held those values are. We conclude by discussing implications for the design of new and existing online communities.
AB - Norms are central to how online communities are governed. Yet, norms are also emergent, arise from interaction, and can vary significantly between communities—making them challenging to study at scale. In this paper, we study community norms on Reddit in a large-scale, empirical manner. Via 2.8M comments removed by moderators of 100 top subreddits over 10 months, we use both computational and qualitative methods to identify three types of norms: Macro norms that are universal to most parts of Reddit; meso norms that are shared across certain groups of subreddits; and micro norms that are specific to individual, relatively unique subreddits. Given the size of Reddit’s user base—and the wide range of topics covered by different subreddits—we argue this represents the first large-scale study of norms across disparate online communities. In other words, these findings shed light on what Reddit values, and how widely-held those values are. We conclude by discussing implications for the design of new and existing online communities.
KW - Community norms
KW - Mixed methods
KW - Moderation
KW - online communities
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85065831427&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=85065831427&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1145/3274301
DO - 10.1145/3274301
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85065831427
SN - 2573-0142
VL - 2
JO - Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction
JF - Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction
IS - CSCW
M1 - 32
ER -