Year: 2024
Type: article
Abstract: Content moderation practices and technologies need to change over time as requirements and community expectations shift. However, attempts to restructure the existing moderation practices can be difficult, especially for platforms that rely on their communities to moderate, because changes can transform the workflow and workload participants' reward systems. By examining the extensive archival discussions around a prepublication moderation technology on Wikipedia named Flagged Revisions, complemented by seven semi-structured interviews, we identify various challenges in restructuring community-based moderation practices. Thus, we find that while a new system might sound good in theory and perform well in terms of quantitative metrics, it may conflict with existing social norms. Furthermore, our findings underscore how the relationship between platforms and self-governed communities can hinder the ability to assess the performance of any new system and introduce considerable costs related to maintaining, overhauling, or scrapping any piece of infrastructure.
DOI: 10.1145/3686954
Authors: Chau Tran, Kejsi Take, Kaylea Champion, Benjamin Mako Hill, Rachel Greenstadt
Institutions: New York University, University of Washington
Language: English
Subfield: Communication
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
Funder: Universitas Brawijaya
Award: G5145823430
OpenAlex ID: W4404171754