Reddit Rules and Rulers: Quantifying the Link Between Rules and Perceptions of Governance across Thousands of Communities

TL;DR

This study tackles the challenge of understanding how community rules relate to governance perceptions in large-scale online communities. It combines a longitudinal rule-timeline reconstruction from the Wayback Machine, a 17-attribute rule taxonomy labeled via a retrieval-augmented GPT-4o classifier, and a governance-perception metric derived from millions of governance-related posts, analyzed with IPTW to control for confounding factors. Key findings show that rules about content presentation, participation, and moderation processes are most positively associated with governance perceptions, and that adding new rules yields an immediate but fading improvement over about six months. The work provides practical implications for platform design and moderation, and contributes public datasets and models to advance further research in online governance and moderation.

Abstract

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.

Figures (7)

• Figure 1: Across all communities on Reddit, community members' publicly expressed perceptions of their governance are approximately constant over time. Of posts and comments discussing governance, on average 11% have positive sentiment, 57% have neutral sentiment, and 32% have negative sentiment.
• Figure 2: Larger communities have both more rules and more diverse rules. Tiny communities have on average 4.32 rules, while huge communities (the 0.77% largest) have on average 9.26 rules. In this and subsequent figures, the bars shown represent bootstrapped 95% confidence intervals.
• Figure 3: Rules vary with regards to their tone. On the whole, restrictive rules are more commonly encountered than prescriptive rules on Reddit, although both are ubiquitous: 87% of communities have at least one restrictive rule, while 70% of communities have at least one prescriptive rule (prevalence). Rules addressing post format and peer engagement are both more likely to be prescriptive ('Be Nice') than restrictive ('Don't be mean'), while all other types of rules are more commonly phrased with restrictive tone.
• Figure 4: The ubiquity of different types of rules differs greatly based on community topic. Discussion and Identity communities are especially likely to have rules about who participates (c). News communities are almost twice as likely to have rules about links and external content (g), on average, while Hobby & Identity communities are more likely to have rules on Commercialization (i). Rules about Images are much more common in Meme and Media communities and very rare in Discussion (often text-based) communities (h).
• Figure 5: Perceptions of moderators vary between communities with and without different types of rules, even after adjusting for confounding factors (§\ref{['sec:iptw']}). Rules about Peer Engagement (a), Post Format (b), Tags & Flairs (c) , and Commercialization (e) are all associated with higher positive perceptions and lower negative perceptions of moderators than communities without those rules. On the other hand, communities with rules about Illegal Content (i), Post Content (j), and Karma/Score (k) have more polarized perceptions of moderation, with positive and negative perceptions both higher than in other communities (which have higher neutral perceptions of moderation, not shown here).