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Making online social communities ‘better’ is a challenging undertaking, as online communities are extraordinarily varied in their size, topical focus, and governance. As such, what is valued by one community may not be valued by another.However, community values are challenging to measure as they are rarely explicitly stated.In this work, we measure community values through the first large-scale survey of community values, including 2,769 reddit users in 2,151 unique subreddits. Through a combination of survey responses and a quantitative analysis of publicly available reddit data, we characterize how these values vary within and across communities.Amongst other findings, we show that community members disagree about how safe their communities are, that longstanding communities place 30.1% more importance on trustworthiness than newer communities, and that community moderators want their communities to be 56.7% less democratic than non-moderator community members.These findings have important implications, including suggesting that care must be taken to protect vulnerable community members, and that participatory governance strategies may be difficult to implement.Accurate and scalable modeling of community values enables research and governance which is tuned to each community's different values. To this end, we demonstrate that a small number of automatically quantifiable features capture a significant yet limited amount of the variation in values between communities with a ROC AUC of 0.667 on a binary classification task.However, substantial variation remains, and modeling community values remains an important topic for future work.We make our models and data public to inform community design and governance.
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No Community Can Do Everything: Why People Participate in Similar Online Communities
Large-scale quantitative analyses have shown that individuals frequently talk to each other about similar things in different online spaces. Why do these overlapping communities exist? We provide an answer grounded in the analysis of 20 interviews with active participants in clusters of highly related subreddits. Within a broad topical area, there are a diversity of benefits an online community can confer. These include (a) specific information and discussion, (b) socialization with similar others, and (c) attention from the largest possible audience. A single community cannot meet all three needs. Our findings suggest that topical areas within an online community platform tend to become populated by groups of specialized communities with diverse sizes, topical boundaries, and rules. Compared with any single community, such systems of overlapping communities are able to provide a greater range of benefits.
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- PAR ID:
- 10602593
- Publisher / Repository:
- Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction
- Volume:
- 6
- Issue:
- CSCW1
- ISSN:
- 2573-0142
- Format(s):
- Medium: X Size: p. 1-25
- Size(s):
- p. 1-25
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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