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

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2111.05835 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.05835/

## Key facts

- Cited by 13 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 10 Nov 2021.

## Built on by (most cited first, 13 of 13)

- [Rehearsal: Simulating Conflict to Teach Conflict Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.12309/) (2023)
- [Beyond Denouncing Hate: Strategies for Countering Implied Biases and Stereotypes in Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.00161/) (2023)
- [Thread With Caution: Proactively Helping Users Assess and Deescalate Tension in Their Online Discussions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.01401/) (2022)
- [Hate Cannot Drive out Hate: Forecasting Conversation Incivility following Replies to Hate Speech](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.04804/) (2023)
- [SPICA: Retrieving Scenarios for Pluralistic In-Context Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.10912/) (2024)
- [Echoes of Discord: Forecasting Hater Reactions to Counterspeech](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.16235/) (2025)
- [Value Alignment of Social Media Ranking Algorithms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.14434/) (2025)
- [Machines in the Crowd? Measuring the Footprint of Machine-Generated Text on Reddit](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.07226/) (2025)
- [Towards Effective Counter-Responses: Aligning Human Preferences with Strategies to Combat Online Trolling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.04164/) (2024)
- [Facilitating Opinion Diversity through Hybrid NLP Approaches](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.09439/) (2024)
- [Large-Scale Analysis of Online Questions Related to Opioid Use Disorder on Reddit](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.08044/) (2025)
- [Digital Gatekeepers: Google's Role in Curating Hashtags and Subreddits](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.14370/) (2025)
- [Are Online Sports Fan Communities Becoming More Offensive? A Quantitative Review of Topics, Trends, and Toxicity of r/PremierLeague](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.27003/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Making online social communities 'better' is a challenging undertaking, as online communities are extraordinarily varied in their size, topical focus, and governance. As such, what is valued by one community may not be valued by another. However, community values are challenging to measure as they are rarely explicitly stated. In this work, we measure community values through the first large-scale survey of community values, including 2,769 reddit users in 2,151 unique subreddits. Through a combination of survey responses and a quantitative analysis of public reddit data, we characterize how these values vary within and across communities. Amongst other findings, we show that community members disagree about how safe their communities are, that longstanding communities place 30.1% more importance on trustworthiness than newer communities, and that community moderators want their communities to be 56.7% less democratic than non-moderator community members. These findings have important implications, including suggesting that care must be taken to protect vulnerable community members, and that participatory governance strategies may be difficult to implement. Accurate and scalable modeling of community values enables research and governance which is tuned to each community's different values. To this end, we demonstrate that a small number of automatically quantifiable features capture a significant yet limited amount of the variation in values between communities with a ROC AUC of 0.667 on a binary classification task. However, substantial variation remains, and modeling community values remains an important topic for future work. We make our models and data public to inform community design and governance.