research-article

Who Moderates on Twitch and What Do They Do?: Quantifying Practices in Community Moderation on Twitch

Authors:

Joseph Seering,

Sanjay R. KairamAuthors Info & Claims

Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, Volume 7, Issue GROUP

Article No.: 18, Pages 1 - 18

https://doi.org/10.1145/3567568

Published: 29 December 2022 Publication History

Abstract

Volunteer moderators are an increasingly essential component of effective community management across a range of services, such as Facebook, Reddit, Discord, YouTube, and Twitch. Prior work has investigated how users of these services become moderators, their attitudes towards community moderation, and the work that they perform, largely through interviews with community moderators and managers. In this paper, we analyze survey data from a large, representative sample of 1,053 adults in the United States who are active Twitch moderators. Our findings -- examining moderator recruitment, motivations, tasks, and roles -- validate observations from prior qualitative work on Twitch moderation, showing not only how they generalize across a wider population of livestreaming contexts, but also how they vary. For example, while moderators in larger channels are more likely to have been chosen because they were regular, active participants, mods in smaller channels are more likely to have had a pre-existing connection with the streamer. We similarly find that channel size predicts differences in how new moderators are onboarded and their motivations for becoming moderators. Finally, we find that moderators' self-perceived roles map to differences in the patterns of conversation, socialization, enforcement, and other tasks that they perform. We discuss these results, how they relate to prior work on community moderation across services, and applications to research and design in volunteer moderation.

References

[1]

Rajkumar Arun, Venkatasubramaniyan Suresh, CE Veni Madhavan, and Narasimha Murthy. 2010. On finding the natural number of topics with latent dirichlet allocation: Some observations. In Pacific-Asia conference on knowledge discovery and data mining. Springer, 391--402.

Digital Library

[2]

United States Census Bureau. 2021. U.S. Census Bureau QuickFacts: United States. https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/US/PST045221 Retrieved May 15, 2022 from

[3]

Jie Cai, Donghee Yvette Wohn, and Mashael Almoqbel. 2021. Moderation Visibility: Mapping the Strategies of Volunteer Moderators in Live Streaming Micro Communities. In ACM International Conference on Interactive Media Experiences (Virtual Event, USA) (IMX '21). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 61--72. https://doi.org/10.1145/3452918.3458796

Digital Library

[4]

Juan Cao, Tian Xia, Jintao Li, Yongdong Zhang, and Sheng Tang. 2009. A density-based method for adaptive LDA model selection. Neurocomputing, Vol. 72, 7--9 (2009), 1775--1781.

Digital Library

[5]

Robyn Caplan. 2018. Content or context moderation? https://apo.org.au/node/203666

[6]

Eshwar Chandrasekharan, Chaitrali Gandhi, Matthew Wortley Mustelier, and Eric Gilbert. 2019. Crossmod: A Cross-Community Learning-Based System to Assist Reddit Moderators. Proc. ACM Hum.-Comput. Interact., Vol. 3, CSCW, Article 174 (Nov. 2019), 30 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3359276

Digital Library

[7]

Eshwar Chandrasekharan, Mattia Samory, Shagun Jhaver, Hunter Charvat, Amy Bruckman, Cliff Lampe, Jacob Eisenstein, and Eric Gilbert. 2018. The Internet's Hidden Rules: An Empirical Study of Reddit Norm Violations at Micro, Meso, and Macro Scales. Proc. ACM Hum.-Comput. Interact., Vol. 2, CSCW, Article 32 (Nov. 2018), 25 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3274301

Digital Library

[8]

Amanda LL Cullen and Sanjay R Kairam. 2022. Practicing Moderation: Community Moderation as Reflective Practice. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, Vol. 6, CSCW1 (2022), 1--32.

Digital Library

[9]

Romain Deveaud, Eric SanJuan, and Patrice Bellot. 2014. Accurate and effective latent concept modeling for ad hoc information retrieval. Document numérique, Vol. 17, 1 (2014), 61--84.

[10]

Bryan Dosono and Bryan Semaan. 2019. Moderation Practices as Emotional Labor in Sustaining Online Communities: The Case of AAPI Identity Work on Reddit. In Proceedings of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (Glasgow, Scotland Uk) (CHI '19). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, Article 142, 13 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3290605.3300372

Digital Library

[11]

Casey Fiesler, Jialun Jiang, Joshua McCann, Kyle Frye, and Jed Brubaker. 2018. Reddit Rules! Characterizing an Ecosystem of Governance. In Proceedings of the Twelfth International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM 2018). AAAI, Menlo Park, CA, USA, 72--81.

[12]

Claudia Flores-Saviaga, Jessica Hammer, Juan Pablo Flores, Joseph Seering, Stuart Reeves, and Saiph Savage. 2019. Audience and Streamer Participation at Scale on Twitch. In Proceedings of the 30th ACM Conference on Hypertext and Social Media (Hof, Germany) (HT '19). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 277--278. https://doi.org/10.1145/3342220.3344926

Digital Library

[13]

Dean Gengle. 1981. Communitree first ed.). The CommuniTree Group, San Francisco, CA, USA.

[14]

Sarah A. Gilbert. 2020. "I Run the World's Largest Historical Outreach Project and It's on a Cesspool of a Website." Moderating a Public Scholarship Site on Reddit: A Case Study of r/AskHistorians. Proc. ACM Hum.-Comput. Interact., Vol. 4, CSCW1, Article 019 (May 2020), 27 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3392822

Digital Library

[15]

Tarleton Gillespie. 2018. Custodians of the Internet: Platforms, Content Moderation, and the Hidden Decisions that Shape Social Media. Yale University Press, New Haven, CT, USA.

[16]

Robin Gomila. 2021. Logistic or linear? Estimating causal effects of experimental treatments on binary outcomes using regression analysis. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, Vol. 150, 4 (2021), 700.

[17]

Thomas L Griffiths and Mark Steyvers. 2004. Finding scientific topics. Proceedings of the National academy of Sciences, Vol. 101, suppl_1 (2004), 5228--5235.

[18]

Starr Roxanne Hiltz and Murray Turoff. 1978. The Network Nation: Human Communication via Computer. Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, Inc., Boston, MA.

Digital Library

[19]

Shagun Jhaver, Iris Birman, Eric Gilbert, and Amy Bruckman. 2019. Human-Machine Collaboration for Content Regulation: The Case of Reddit Automoderator. ACM Trans. Comput.-Hum. Interact., Vol. 26, 5, Article 31 (July 2019), 35 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3338243

Digital Library

[20]

Jialun Aaron Jiang, Charles Kiene, Skyler Middler, Jed R. Brubaker, and Casey Fiesler. 2019. Moderation Challenges in Voice-based Online Communities on Discord. Proc. ACM Hum.-Comput. Interact., Vol. 3, CSCW, Article 55 (Nov. 2019), 23 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3359157

Digital Library

[21]

Sanjay R Kairam, Melissa C Mercado, and Steven A Sumner. 2022. A Social-Ecological Approach to Modeling Sense of Virtual Community (SOVC) in Livestreaming Communities. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, Vol. 6, CSCW2 (2022).

Digital Library

[22]

Charles Kiene, Jialun Aaron Jiang, and Benjamin Mako Hill. 2019. Technological Frames and User Innovation: Exploring Technological Change in Community Moderation Teams. Proc. ACM Hum.-Comput. Interact., Vol. 3, CSCW, Article 44 (Nov. 2019), 23 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3359146

Digital Library

[23]

Charles Kiene, Andrés Monroy-Hernández, and Benjamin Mako Hill. 2016. Surviving an “Eternal September”: How an Online Community Managed a Surge of Newcomers. In Proceedings of the 2016 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (San Jose, California, USA) (CHI '16). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 1152--1156. https://doi.org/10.1145/2858036.2858356

Digital Library

[24]

Claudia Lo. 2018. When All You Have is a Banhammer: The Social and Communicative Work of Volunteer Moderators. Master's thesis. Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

[25]

T. M. London, J. Crundwell, M. B. Eastley, N. Santiago, and J. Jenkins. 2020. Finding Effective Moderation Practices on Twitch. In Digital Ethics: Rhetoric and Responsibility in Online Aggression, Jessica Reyman and Erika Sparby (Eds.). Routledge, New York, USA, Chapter 4, 51--68.

[26]

J. Nathan Matias. 2019. The Civic Labor of Volunteer Moderators Online. Social Media Society, Vol. 5, 2 (2019), 12 pages. https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305119836778

[27]

Elizabeth Reid. 1999. Hierarchy and Power: Social Control in Cyberspace. In Communities in Cyberspace 1st ed.), Marc A. Smith and P. Kollock (Eds.). Routledge, New York, NY, USA, 107--134.

[28]

Joseph Seering, Geoff Kaufman, and Stevie Chancellor. 2022. Metaphors in moderation. New Media & Society, Vol. 24 (2022), 621--640. Issue 3. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444820964968

[29]

Joseph Seering, Robert Kraut, and Laura Dabbish. 2017. Shaping Pro and Anti-Social Behavior on Twitch Through Moderation and Example-Setting. In Proceedings of the 2017 ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (Portland, Oregon, USA) (CSCW '17). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 111--125. https://doi.org/10.1145/2998181.2998277

Digital Library

[30]

Joseph Seering, Tony Wang, Jina Yoon, and Geoff Kaufman. 2019. Moderator engagement and community development in the age of algorithms. New Media & Society, Vol. 21, 7 (2019), 1417--1443. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444818821316

[31]

Jeff T. Sheng and Sanjay R. Kairam. 2020. From Virtual Strangers to IRL Friends: Relationship Development in Livestreaming Communities on Twitch. Proc. ACM Hum.-Comput. Interact., Vol. 4, CSCW2, Article 94 (oct 2020), 34 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3415165

Digital Library

[32]

Anna DuVal Smith. 1999. Problems of Conflict Management in Virtual Communities. In Communities in Cyberspace 1st ed.), Marc A Smith and P Kollock (Eds.). Routledge, New York, NY, USA, 135--166.

[33]

Janet Sternberg. 2012. Misbehavior in cyber places: The regulation of online conduct in virtual communities on the Internet. Rowman & Littlefield, Lanham, MD, USA.

[34]

Jirassaya Uttarapong, Jie Cai, and Donghee Yvette Wohn. 2021. Harassment Experiences of Women and LGBTQ Live Streamers and How They Handled Negativity. In ACM International Conference on Interactive Media Experiences (Virtual Event, USA) (IMX '21). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 7--19. https://doi.org/10.1145/3452918.3458794

Digital Library

[35]

Michael Waters. 2020. How a 1980s AIDS Support Group Changed The Internet Forever. https://onezero.medium.com/the-long-forgotten-story-of-ben-gardiner-the-aids-activist-whose-network-transformed-the-internet-c14460a73165

[36]

Donghee Yvette Wohn. 2019. Volunteer Moderators in Twitch Micro Communities: How They Get Involved, the Roles They Play, and the Emotional Labor They Experience. In Proceedings of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (Glasgow, Scotland Uk) (CHI '19). ACM, New York, NY, USA, Article 160, 13 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3290605.3300390

Digital Library

[37]

Bingjie Yu, Joseph Seering, Katta Spiel, and Leon Watts. 2020. "Taking Care of a Fruit Tree": Nurturing as a Layer of Concern in Online Community Moderation. In Extended Abstracts of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (Honolulu, HI, USA) (CHI EA '20). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 1--9. https://doi.org/10.1145/3334480.3383009 io

Digital Library

Cited By

DURMUŞ ŞENYAPAR H(2024)A Comprehensive Analysis of Influencer Types in Digital MarketingA Comprehensive Analysis of Influencer Types in Digital MarketingInternational Journal of Management and Administration10.29064/ijma.14172918:15(75-100)Online publication date: 29-Feb-2024
https://doi.org/10.29064/ijma.1417291
Bulat BWang HFujimoto SFrey S(2024)The psychology of volunteer moderators: Tradeoffs between participation, belonging, and norms in online community governanceNew Media & Society10.1177/14614448241259028Online publication date: 29-Jul-2024
https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448241259028
Atreja SIm JResnick PHemphill L(2024)AppealMod: Inducing Friction to Reduce Moderator Workload of Handling User AppealsProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/36372968:CSCW1(1-35)Online publication date: 26-Apr-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3637296
Show More Cited By

Index Terms

Who Moderates on Twitch and What Do They Do?: Quantifying Practices in Community Moderation on Twitch
1. Human-centered computing
  1. Collaborative and social computing
  2. Human computer interaction (HCI)
    1. Empirical studies in HCI

Recommendations

Practicing Moderation: Community Moderation as Reflective Practice
CSCW1

Many types of online communities rely on volunteer moderators to manage the community and maintain behavioral standards. While prior work has shown that community moderators often develop a deep understanding of the goals of their moderation context and ...
Volunteer Moderators in Twitch Micro Communities: How They Get Involved, the Roles They Play, and the Emotional Labor They Experience
CHI '19: Proceedings of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems

The ability to engage in real-time text conversations is an important feature on live streaming platforms. The moderation of this text content relies heavily on the work of unpaid volunteers. This study reports on interviews with 20 people who moderate ...
Streaming on twitch: fostering participatory communities of play within live mixed media
CHI '14: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems

Previously, video streaming sites were at the fringes of online social media. In the past two years, live streams of video games, on sites such as Twitch.tv, have become very popular. Live streams serve as meeting grounds for player communities. The ...

Comments

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction

Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction Volume 7, Issue GROUP

GROUP

January 2023

414 pages

EISSN:2573-0142

DOI:10.1145/3578937

Editor:
Jeff Nichols
Apple Inc., United States

Issue’s Table of Contents

Copyright © 2023 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 29 December 2022

Published in PACMHCI Volume 7, Issue GROUP

Permissions

Request permissions for this article.

Request Permissions

Check for updates

Author Tags

Qualifiers

Research-article

Contributors

Other Metrics

View Article Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

6
Total Citations
View Citations
613
Total Downloads

Downloads (Last 12 months)281
Downloads (Last 6 weeks)19

Reflects downloads up to 18 Aug 2024

Other Metrics

View Author Metrics

Citations

Cited By

DURMUŞ ŞENYAPAR H(2024)A Comprehensive Analysis of Influencer Types in Digital MarketingA Comprehensive Analysis of Influencer Types in Digital MarketingInternational Journal of Management and Administration10.29064/ijma.14172918:15(75-100)Online publication date: 29-Feb-2024
https://doi.org/10.29064/ijma.1417291
Bulat BWang HFujimoto SFrey S(2024)The psychology of volunteer moderators: Tradeoffs between participation, belonging, and norms in online community governanceNew Media & Society10.1177/14614448241259028Online publication date: 29-Jul-2024
https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448241259028
Atreja SIm JResnick PHemphill L(2024)AppealMod: Inducing Friction to Reduce Moderator Workload of Handling User AppealsProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/36372968:CSCW1(1-35)Online publication date: 26-Apr-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3637296
Cai JPatel ANaderi AWohn D(2024)Content Moderation Justice and Fairness on Social Media: Comparisons Across Different Contexts and PlatformsExtended Abstracts of the 2024 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3613905.3650882(1-9)Online publication date: 11-May-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3613905.3650882
Merayo NCotelo RCarratalá-Sáez RAndújar F(2024)Applying machine learning to assess emotional reactions to video game content streamed on Spanish Twitch channelsComputer Speech & Language10.1016/j.csl.2024.10165188(101651)Online publication date: Nov-2024
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.csl.2024.101651
Wang S(2023)Why do female audiences subscribe to these types of streamers? An empirical study on the motivations of Chinese Huya usersFrontiers in Psychology10.3389/fpsyg.2023.124745114Online publication date: 28-Nov-2023
https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1247451
Han CSeering JKumar DHancock JDurumeric Z(2023)Hate Raids on Twitch: Echoes of the Past, New Modalities, and Implications for Platform GovernanceProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/35796097:CSCW1(1-28)Online publication date: 16-Apr-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3579609

View Options

Get Access

Login options

Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.

Full Access

Get this Article

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

eReader

View online with eReader.

Media

Figures

Other

Tables

View Issue’s Table of Contents