Perceptions of Moderators as a Large-Scale Measure of Online Community Governance

This website is a companion site for our paper titled Perceptions of Moderators as a Large-Scale Measure of Online Community Governance, which will appear at CSCW 2025. A preprint of this paper is available on arXiv, please read it for more details on our methods and results.

A summary of our results and some additional discussion is available over at /r/TheoryOfReddit.

If you make use of our data, please cite our paper:

@misc{weld2024perceptions,
      title={Perceptions of Moderators as a Large-Scale Measure of Online Community Governance}, 
      author={Galen Weld and Leon Leibmann and Amy X. Zhang and Tim Althoff},
      year={2025},
      journal={CSCW},
}

Moderator Discourse Data

We are in the process of computing moderator discourse data for a larger time period. For now, data is available for all subreddits from January 2020-June 2021, the same time period covered in our paper. Due to reddit licensing issues, we only make ‘dehydrated’ data available here, which is to say we do not include the content of the posts and comments, only their sentiment with regards to moderators, along with some metadata for convenience. If you have any questions, please contact Galen Weld, the corresponding author for this work.

Data Schema

The data consists of the following fields, in .csv format:

id: the post or comment id
subreddit: the subreddit the post or comment was in
kind: post or comment
timestamp: timestamp the post or comment was created, in seconds since the unix epoch (UTC)
sentiment_wrt_mods: the sentiment predicted our by our model: positive, neutral, or negative

Data Files

Filename	Number of Posts	Number of Comments	Total Records
2020-01.jsonl	11,175 posts	106,488 comments	117,663 total
2020-02.jsonl	10,331 posts	95,337 comments	105,668 total
2020-03.jsonl	11,599 posts	91,881 comments	103,480 total
2020-04.jsonl	11,571 posts	88,047 comments	99,618 total
2020-05.jsonl	14,558 posts	105,927 comments	120,485 total
2020-06.jsonl	13,941 posts	116,752 comments	130,693 total
2020-07.jsonl	13,187 posts	106,283 comments	119,470 total
2020-08.jsonl	15,821 posts	125,424 comments	141,245 total
2020-09.jsonl	9,243 posts	90,987 comments	100,230 total
2020-10.jsonl	8,527 posts	92,199 comments	100,726 total
2020-11.jsonl	8,673 posts	77,257 comments	85,930 total
2020-12.jsonl	7,735 posts	81,593 comments	89,328 total
2021-01.jsonl	11,034 posts	108,171 comments	119,205 total
2021-02.jsonl	10,734 posts	89,859 comments	100,593 total
2021-03.jsonl	10,417 posts	100,067 comments	110,484 total
2021-04.jsonl	9,932 posts	99,853 comments	109,785 total
2021-05.jsonl	9,366 posts	53,498 comments	62,864 total
2021-06.jsonl	8,387 posts	64,928 comments	73,315 total

Data Download

You may download all the above files, or individual files, from our github repo.

Daily Counts Data

If you prefer, we also provide a single large .csv containing daily counts, for each subreddit, of the number of posts and comments with positive, neutral, and negative sentiment with regards to the moderators. Importantly, these data also include counts of total posts and comments (of any type, not just those addressing moderators), as well as the number of removed and deleted comments (detected using [removed] tags). You may download this file here. It spans from July 2018 to June 2021.

The data consists of the following columns:

subreddit: the name of the subreddit
date: the date of the count (UTC time delineated)
total_posts: total number of posts, of any type
total_comments: total number of comments, of any type
removed_comments: total number of posts that were removed by moderators
removed_posts: total number of comments that were removed by moderators
mod_items_positive: total number of posts and comments discussing moderators, and expressing positive sentiment towards those moderators
mod_items_negative: total number of posts and comments discussing moderators, and expressing negative sentiment towards those moderators
mod_items_neutral: total number of posts and comments discussing moderators, and expressing neutral sentiment towards those moderators