The Internet's Hidden Rules

Abstract

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.

TalkDown: A Corpus for Condescension Detection in Context

“…Third, users can develop strong identities on the site, which could facilitate user-level modeling, but these identities are generally pseudonymous, which is useful when studying charged social phenomena Wang and Jurgens, 2018). Fourth, the subreddit structure of the site creates opportunities to study the impact of condescension on community structure and norms (Buntain and Golbeck, 2014;Lin et al, 2017;Chandrasekharan et al, 2018).…”

"The Most Trustworthy Coin"

“…Additionally, we only examined a single subreddit. Both our corpus size and the amount of activity in our community of interest is comparable to other qualitative coding approaches in online communities [27].…”

“…After filtering out threads with very little content (no comments or no on-topic comments) and threads off-topic for the subreddit, we ended up coding 226 of these as relevant to trust in Bitcoin. In qualitative approaches to understanding social practices on Reddit there is considerable variety in the corpus size used [15,20,27] with emphasis placed on data saturation in determining an appropriate corpus size [4]. We identified relevant comments based on the codebook we developed after the initial exploratory analysis of r/bitcoin.…”

How We Do Things With Words: Analyzing Text as Social and Cultural Data

“…Unsupervised approaches, such as topic models, uncover natural structure in the data and are therefore especially useful for exploration. For example, Chandrasekharan et al (2018) identify clusters of content-moderation strategies on Reddit, corresponding to natural groupings of communities based on their moderation stances toward various types of content. In this setting, conceptualization and operationalization may occur simultaneously, with theory emerging from the data (Baumer et al, 2017).…”