Overview

What does it mean to make an online community “better”? In this project, we seek to understand what community members value in their communities. This project consists of two parts: first, a small scale qualitative survey of 39 redditors, which used open-ended free text response questions to develop a taxonomy of 29 different values across 9 major categories, and second, a larger-scale quantitative survey which used the taxonomy from the previous survey to gather responses from 2,769 redditors across 2,151 subreddits.

We make anonymized responses from the quantitative survey public to support future research. Details and downloads for this dataset are available here.

Dataset

We make anonymized responses from the quantitative survey public to support future research. Details and downloads for this dataset are available here.

Papers

Making Online Communities ‘Better’: A Taxonomy of Community Values on Reddit

This paper describes our qualitative survey and taxonomy of community values.

What Makes Online Communities ‘Better’? Measuring Values, Consensus, and Conflict across Thousands of Subreddits

This paper describes our quantitative survey and large-scale analysis of responses.

People

Galen Weld

Galen Weld is a PhD 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 know via email: gweld AT cs DOT washington DOT edu.