Overview
How do communities perceive their moderation? How do rules shape these perceptions? We study these questions in the context of Reddit, a large online community platform. We provide a dataset of Reddit posts and comments, annotated with sentiment towards moderation and rule classification. We also provide a taxonomy of rules and a classification pipeline for determining a post or comment’s sentiment towards moderation.
Dataset
We provide both a dataset of Reddit posts and comments discussing moderators and a timeline of community rules. These data include sentiment towards moderation annotations and rule classification labels, anonymized to protect user privacy.
Papers
Perceptions of Moderators as a Large-Scale Measure of Online Community Governance
This CSCW 2025 paper describes our classification pipeline for determining a post or comment’s sentiment towards moderation and analyzes the link between sentiment towards moderation and moderation staff itself.
Reddit Rules and Rulers: Quantifying the Link Between Rules and Perceptions of Governance across Thousands of Communities
This ICWSM 2025 paper describes our taxonomy of rules, rule classification pipeline, and rule timeline analysis. It analyzes the relationship between rules and governance perceptions in online communities.
People
Galen Weld
Galen Weld is a PhD student at the University of Washington’s Allen School of Computer Science and Engineering.
Leon Leibmann
Leon Leibmann is an undergraduate student at the University of Washington’s Allen School of Computer Science and Engineering.
Amy X. Zhang
Amy X. Zhang is an Assistant Professor at the University of Washington’s Allen School of Computer Science and Engineering, where she runs the Social Futures Lab.
Tim Althoff
Tim Althoff is an Assistant Professor at the University of Washington’s Allen School of Computer Science and Engineering, where he runs the Behavioral Data Science Lab.
Contact
For questions, or if you find an issue on this site, please let Galen Weld or Leon Leibmann know via email: contact AT leibmann DOT org & gweld AT cs DOT washington DOT edu.