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Much of our modern digital infrastructure relies critically upon open sourced software. The communities responsible for building this cyberinfrastructure require maintenance and moderation, which is often supported by volunteer efforts. Moderation, as a non-technical form of labor, is a necessary but often overlooked task that maintainers undertake to sustain the community around an OSS project. This study examines the various structures and norms that support community moderation, describes the strategies moderators use to mitigate conflicts, and assesses how bots can play a role in assisting these processes. We interviewed 14 practitioners to uncover existing moderation practices and ways that automation can provide assistance. Our main contributions include a characterization of moderated content in OSS projects, moderation techniques, as well as perceptions of and recommendations for improving the automation of moderation tasks. We hope that these findings will inform the implementation of more effective moderation practices in open source communities.
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This content will become publicly available on November 7, 2025
Challenges in Restructuring Community-based Moderation
Content moderation practices and technologies need to change over time as requirements and community expectations shift. However, attempts to restructure the existing moderation practices can be difficult, especially for platforms that rely on their communities to moderate, because changes can transform the workflow and workload participants' reward systems. By examining the extensive archival discussions around a prepublication moderation technology on Wikipedia named Flagged Revisions, complemented by seven semi-structured interviews, we identify various challenges in restructuring community-based moderation practices. Thus, we find that while a new system might sound good in theory and perform well in terms of quantitative metrics, it may conflict with existing social norms. Furthermore, our findings underscore how the relationship between platforms and self-governed communities can hinder the ability to assess the performance of any new system and introduce considerable costs related to maintaining, overhauling, or scrapping any piece of infrastructure.
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- PAR ID:
- 10565773
- Publisher / Repository:
- ACM
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction
- Volume:
- 8
- Issue:
- CSCW2
- ISSN:
- 2573-0142
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 1 to 24
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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