What Makes Online Communities 'Better'? Measuring Values, Consensus, and Conflict across Thousands of Subreddits

Abstract

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. In this work, we measure community values through a survey of 2,769 reddit users in 2,151 unique subreddits, the largest survey of community values to date. 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. We find that there is 47.4% more disagreement over how safe communities are than disagreement over other aspects of communities' current state, that longstanding communities place 30.1% more emphasis on trustworthiness than newer communities, and that recently joined redditors perceive their communities more positively than more senior redditors. We find that community moderators want their communities to be 56.7% less democratic than non-moderator community members. 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 captures a substantial amount of the variation in values between communities with a ROC AUC of 0.667 on a binary classification task. However, significant 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.

How Founder Motivations, Goals, and Actions Influence Early Trajectories of Online Communities

“…While founders' goals for their nascent communities varied, founders generally prioritized quality over quantity as a measure of success. This finding aligns with previous research showing that participants and moderators prioritize quality over size within established communties [13,16,47]. Founders motivated to 'exchange information' were more likely to prioritize community quality, while those motivated by 'self-promotion' were more likely to prioritize quantity.…”

“…As with motivations, most research on goals or values focuses on the members or leaders of existing communities. This research shows that community members and moderators have multiple goals, though common aspects of a community valued by users include community quality, information exchange, and opportunities to connect with others [24,47]. Some scholars have thus suggested changes in how we conceptualize community success, such as using multiple metrics or aligning metrics with community goals [2,30].…”