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Many researchers studying online communities seek to make them better. However, beyond a small set of widely-held values, such as combating misinformation and abuse, determining what `better’ means can be challenging, as community members may disagree, values may be in conflict, and different communities may have differing preferences as a whole.In this work, we present the first study that elicits values directly from members across a diverse set of communities.We survey 212 members of 627 unique subreddits and ask them to describe their values for their communities in their own words. Through iterative categorization of 1,481 responses, we develop and validate a comprehensive taxonomy of community values, consisting of 29 subcategories within nine top-level categories enabling principled, quantitative study of community values by researchers. Using our taxonomy, we reframe existing research problems, such as managing influxes of new members, as tensions between different values, and we identify understudied values, such as those regarding content quality and community size. We call for greater attention to vulnerable community members' values, and we make our codebook public for use in future research.
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This content will become publicly available on October 18, 2026
Beyond the Individual: A Community-Engaged Framework for Ethical Online Community Research
Online community research routinely poses minimal risk to individuals, but does the same hold true for online communities? In response to high-profile breaches of online community trust and increased debate in the social computing research community on the ethics of online community research, this paper investigates community-level harms and benefits of research. Through 9 participatory-inspired workshops with four critical online communities (Wikipedia, InTheRooms, CaringBridge, and r/AskHistorians), we found researchers should engage more directly with communities' primary purpose by rationalizing their methods and contributions in the context of community goals to equalize the beneficiaries of community research. To facilitate deeper alignment of these expectations, we present the FACTORS (Functions for Action with Communities: Teaching, Overseeing, Reciprocating, and Sustaining) framework for ethical online community research. Finally, we reflect on our findings by providing implications for researchers and online communities to identify and implement functions for navigating community-level harms and benefits.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2220509
- PAR ID:
- 10657574
- Publisher / Repository:
- ACM
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction
- Volume:
- 9
- Issue:
- 7
- ISSN:
- 2573-0142
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 1 to 33
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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