Quantifying Governance of Online Communities at Web Scale

Online communities are powerful tools to connect people and are used worldwide by billions of people. Nearly all online communities rely upon moderators or admins to govern the community in order to mitigate potential harms such as harassment, polarization, and deleterious effects on mental health. However, online communities are complex systems, and studying the impact of community governance empirically at scale is challenging because of the many aspects of community governance and outcomes that must be quantified. In this work, we develop methods to quantify the governance of online communities at web scale. We survey community members to build a comprehensive understanding of what it means to make communities 'better,' then assess existing governance practices and associate them with important outcomes to inform community moderators. We collaborate with communities to deploy our governance interventions to maximize the positive impact of our work, and, at every step of the way, we make our datasets and methods public to support further research on this important topic.