Notices by Sarah Gilbert (sarahgilbert@hci.social)

1/7 With all the talk about moderation on mastodon, most of the discussions I’ve seen have centered on the work and experiences of paid commercial content moderators. But volunteer community moderators have done this work for a long time! I’m going to share some of my favorite papers about the experiences of community content moderators. Apologies to the authors if you’re on Mastodon and I didn’t tag you! And please share your favorites!

3/7 In “The civic labor of volunteer moderators online” @natematias outlines the complexity of moderation work as mods navigate competing forces of users, other mods, and the platform itself. He notes that moderation isn’t just about mod actions (like removing comments or banning users) but also involves negotiating their role in a system that relies on their labour.

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/2056305119836778

2/7 I’m going to start with one of my favorite papers, “Metaphors in moderation” in which Joseph Seering, Geoff Kauffman, and @stevie interviewed community mods across platforms and compiled metaphors they used to describe their work. My favorite is moderation as gardening (see my header image!) in which moderation is a form of caregiving that allows communities to grow

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1461444820964968

4/7 Here are two amazing papers by Bryan Dosono and Bryan Semaan who interviewed moderators of AAPI subreddits, discussing the emotional labour of moderation and the strategies they use to manage it, and how mods of these subs engage in decolonization practices on Reddit. These papers are especially timely because they show the extra work and extra risks involved in creating spaces for people who are marginalized, by people who are marginalized.

https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3290605.3300372
https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3392881

Navigating power structures is something that volunteer mods do everyday—learning from them can provide important insights into how to improve moderation and reduce the harm it can cause.

In the paper, I use collaborative ethnography with mods of r/AskHistorians and share three stories where mods navigated power: one about a contentious decision; one about fighting racism on Reddit through civil action and education; and the last about an intense period of turmoil and how it impacted policy.

Moderation often kind of sucks—there’s either too much, and marginalized folks are silenced, or there’s not enough, and things like hate, harassment, and disinfo spread.

But what if moderation could be empowering? There are lots of proposed alternative models to improve moderation. In my new paper, coming out in CSCW soon, I argue that moderation needs to account for power to help us understand where it works, where it breaks down, and why.

Pre-print available here: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2305.11250.pdf