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Rules are a critical component of the functioning of nearly every online community, yet it is challenging for community moderators to make data-driven decisions about what rules to set for their communities. The connection between a community's rules and how its membership feels about its governance is not well understood. In this work, we conduct the largest-to-date analysis of rules on Reddit, collecting a set of 67,545 unique rules across 5,225 communities which collectively account for more than 67% of all content on Reddit. More than just a point-in-time study, our work measures how communities change their rules over a 5+ year period. We develop a method to classify these rules using a taxonomy of 17 key attributes extended from previous work. We assess what types of rules are most prevalent, how rules are phrased, and how they vary across communities of different types. Using a dataset of communities' discussions about their governance, we are the first to identify the rules most strongly associated with positive community perceptions of governance: rules addressing who participates, how content is formatted and tagged, and rules about commercial activities. We conduct a longitudinal study to quantify the impact of adding new rules to communities, finding that after a rule is added, community perceptions of governance immediately improve, yet this effect diminishes after six months. Our results have important implications for platforms, moderators, and researchers. We make our classification model and rules datasets public to support future research on this topic.

Millions of online communities are governed by volunteer moderators, who shape their communities by setting and enforcing rules, recruiting additional moderators, and participating in the community themselves. These moderators must regularly make decisions about how to govern, yet measuring the 'success' of governance is complex and nuanced, making it challenging to determine what governance strategies are most successful. Furthermore, prior work has shown that communities have differing values, suggesting that 'one-size-fits-all' approaches to governance are unlikely to serve all communities well. In this work, we assess governance practices on reddit by classifying the sentiment of community members' public discussion of their own moderators. We label 1.89 million posts and comments made on reddit over an 18 month period. We relate these perceptions to characteristics of community governance, and to different actions that community moderators take. We identify types of communities where moderators are perceived particularly positively and negatively, and highlight promising strategies for moderator teams. Amongst other findings, we show that strict rule enforcement is linked to more favorable perceptions of moderators of communities dedicated to certain topics, such as news communities, than others. We investigate what kinds of moderators are associated with improved community perceptions upon their addition to a mod team, and find that moderators who are active community members before and during their mod tenures are seen more favorably. We make our models, anonymized datasets, and code public.

Millions of online communities are governed by volunteer moderators, who shape their communities by setting and enforcing rules, recruiting additional moderators, and participating in the community themselves. These moderators must regularly make decisions about how to govern, yet measuring the 'success' of governance is complex and nuanced, making it challenging to determine what governance strategies are most successful. Furthermore, prior work has shown that communities have differing values, suggesting that 'one-size-fits-all' approaches to governance are unlikely to serve all communities well. In this work, we assess governance practices on reddit by classifying the sentiment of community members' public discussion of their own moderators. We label 1.89 million posts and comments made on reddit over an 18 month period. We relate these perceptions to characteristics of community governance, and to different actions that community moderators take. We identify types of communities where moderators are perceived particularly positively and negatively, and highlight promising strategies for moderator teams. Amongst other findings, we show that strict rule enforcement is linked to more favorable perceptions of moderators of communities dedicated to certain topics, such as news communities, than others. We investigate what kinds of moderators are associated with improved community perceptions upon their addition to a mod team, and find that moderators who are active community members before and during their mod tenures are seen more favorably. We make all our models, datasets, and code public.