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Online communities rely on effective governance for success, and volunteer moderators are crucial for ensuring such governance. Despite their significance, much remains to be explored in understanding the relationship between community governance processes and moderators’ psychological experiences. To bridge this gap, we conducted an online survey with over 600 moderators from Reddit communities, exploring the link between different governance strategies and moderators’ needs and motivations. Our investigation reveals a contrast to conventional views on democratic governance within online communities. While participatory processes are associated with higher levels of perceived fairness, they are also linked with reduced feelings of community belonging and lower levels of institutional acceptance among moderators. Our findings challenge the assumption that greater democratic involvement unequivocally leads to positive community outcomes, suggesting instead that more centralized governance approaches can also positively affect moderators’ psychological well-being and, by extension, community cohesion and effectiveness. 

Building a successful community means governing active populations and limited resources. This challenge often requires communities to design formal governance systems from scratch. But the characteristics of successful institutional designs are unclear. Communities that are more mature and established may have more elaborate formal policy systems (as cause or effect of their success). Alternatively, they may require less formalization precisely because of their maturity: because they have more latitude and capacity to select and acculturate new members, or because their reputations encourage greater self-selection. Indeed, scholars often downplay the role that formal rules relative to unwritten rules, norms, and values. But in a community with formal rules, decisions are more consistent, transparent, and legitimate. To understand the relationship of formal institutions to community maturity and governance style, we conduct a large-scale quantitative analysis applying institutional analysis frameworks of self-governance scholar Elinor Ostrom to 80,000 communities across 3 platforms: the sandbox game Minecraft, the MMO game World of Warcraft, and Reddit. We classify communities' written rules according to several institutional taxonomies in order to test predictors of institutional formalization. From this analysis we extract two major findings. First, institutional formalization, the size and complexity of an online community's governance system, is generally positively associated with maturity, as measured by age, population size, or degree of user engagement. Second, we find that online communities employ similar governance styles across platforms, strongly favoring weak norms to strong requirements. These findings suggest that designers and founders of online communities converge, to some extent independently, on styles of governance practice that are correlated with successful self-governance. With deeper insights into the patterns of successful self-governance, we can help more communities overcome the challenges of self-governance and create for their members powerful experiences of shared meaning and collective empowerment.?