Where do rules come from in online communities? This study investigates how and why online communities adopt and change their rules. We conducted a grounded theory-based analysis of 40 in-depth interviews with community leaders from subreddits, Fandom wikis, and Fediverse servers, and identified seven processes involved in the adoption of online community rules. Our findings reveal that, beyond operational reasons like regulating behavior and solving problems, rules are also adopted and changed for relational reasons, such as signaling or reinforcing community legitimacy and identity to other communities. While rule change was often prompted by challenges during community growth or decline, change also depended on volunteer leaders’ work capacity, the presence of member feedback mechanisms, and relational dynamics between leaders and members. Our findings extend prior theories from social computing and organizational research, illustrating how institutionalist and ecological explanations of the relational origins of rules complement operational accounts. Finally, we build on these explanations to offer a set of design propositions that reflect the relational aspects of rules and rulemaking across communities’ lifecycles.
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Although leaders often adopt rules to regulate behavior and content, we find that this is only part of the story. Rules also reinforce a community’s distinctive identity within an online platform and establish a community’s legitimacy in broader networks. This insight complements and challenges prior operational accounts of the sources and purposes of rules in social computing work, from both social engineering and community governance perspectives, and reveals underappreciated relational aspects of rulemaking. Some of these relational aspects are external, such as when rules draw distinctions or signal alignments between communities. Others are internal, as when rules reinforce identity or consensus among a community’s leadership team or between leaders and regular members.
Both internal and external relationships are important in the processes of rulemaking; they draw attention to problems, help form solutions, and shape decisions about changing the rules. Our work also extends prior quantitative research in CSCW on changes in community rules [31, 74] by showing how leaders think about rule creation and change, as well as how different community platforms may shape rulemaking processes by constraining relations in different ways.
In the rest of our Discussion, we consider the implications of relational dynamics of rules in governance systems for online communities. We then reflect on how our findings inform theories of institutional design and change in online communities as well as directions for future research on community governance. Along the way, we highlight a set of design propositions that suggest future work—both system building as well as empirical evaluation—derived from a more relational understanding of online community rules. We present these as tentative propositions for future design and evaluation work to illustrate the applicability of our theoretical framework, rather than as definitively proven guidelines.
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A prevailing assumption in prior scholarship is that rules formalize social norms that regulate interactions within communities [9, 16, 36, 56, 77]. Rules are treated as instruments for directing human interactions in computer-mediated environments. We find that, in addition to advancing this operational purpose, rules also serve relational purposes as leaders design rules with respect to other communities, leaders, and users.
First, rules set and sustain community boundaries, particularly to protect community identity amid evolving membership dynamics. The challenge of protecting identity is important—particularly for communities prone to influxes of new members who may alter the community’s composition or undermine its focus [60]. In response, communities discoverable on large platforms and open to broad participation often implement rules that restrict off-topic content. While prior work has suggested that rules contribute to identity formation [9, 28, 81], our findings show that communities may defend their identity over time by prescribing strict guidelines for participation, often through reference to related communities. We extend prior work by Hwang and Foote [44] and TeBlunthuis et al. [89] who emphasize the importance of membership size and niche audiences within ecosystems of interdependent communities. This relational use of rules helps explain the concept of “nested niches,” in which communities thrive through their embeddedness in a broader socio-informational ecosystem [44]. Rules may provide tools for drawing and maintaining boundaries between specialist and generalist spaces—especially on platforms, such as Reddit, where communities often emerge from one another and share overlapping members and topics [85, 86, 87].
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A prevailing assumption in prior scholarship is that rules formalize social norms that regulate interactions within communities [9, 16, 36, 56, 77]. Rules are treated as instruments for directing human interactions in computer-mediated environments. We find that, in addition to advancing this operational purpose, rules also serve relational purposes as leaders design rules with respect to other communities, leaders, and users.
First, rules set and sustain community boundaries, particularly to protect community identity amid evolving membership dynamics. The challenge of protecting identity is important—particularly for communities prone to influxes of new members who may alter the community’s composition or undermine its focus [60]. In response, communities discoverable on large platforms and open to broad participation often implement rules that restrict off-topic content. While prior work has suggested that rules contribute to identity formation [9, 28, 81], our findings show that communities may defend their identity over time by prescribing strict guidelines for participation, often through reference to related communities. We extend prior work by Hwang and Foote [44] and TeBlunthuis et al. [89] who emphasize the importance of membership size and niche audiences within ecosystems of interdependent communities. This relational use of rules helps explain the concept of “nested niches,” in which communities thrive through their embeddedness in a broader socio-informational ecosystem [44]. Rules may provide tools for drawing and maintaining boundaries between specialist and generalist spaces—especially on platforms, such as Reddit, where communities often emerge from one another and share overlapping members and topics [85, 86, 87].
A pretty refreshing look at how communities form and establish boundaries, and it features the Fediverse too! I think what makes this a good fit for this community is that it is easy to flatten and invisibilize dynamics this paper captures beautifully and brings to the forefront.