Weld, Galen, Amy X. Zhang, and Tim Althoff. "What makes online communities ‘better’? Measuring values, consensus, and conflict across thousands of subreddits." Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media. Vol. 16. 2022.

This study presents a large-scale analysis of community values across 2,151 unique subreddits involving 2,769 Reddit users to understand how values vary within and across online communities. Key findings include significant disagreements on community safety, a higher valuation of trustworthiness in older communities, and a notable preference among moderators for less democratic governance compared to non-moderator members. The study underscores the complexity of implementing participatory governance and the necessity of protecting vulnerable members. It also demonstrates the potential and limitations of using quantitative methods to model community values, achieving a ROC AUC of 0.667 in a binary classification task aimed at predicting these values. The authors highlight the ongoing challenge of accurately modeling community values and make their models and data available for future research, aiming to support more nuanced community design and governance.