Rule Development in Online Communities Amidst Growth and Generative AI

Online community moderators continually adapt their rules to meet changing realities. The dynamics of these micro-level governance actions reflect various community needs and online moderation strategies. Understanding how online communities adapt their moderation rules as they grow and face new threats, such as Generative AI content, could reveal the micro-governance mechanisms that keep user-driven platforms functional and contributes to digital platforms’ resilience. This study analyzes moderation rule changes in response to existing and emerging challenges across over five thousand communities on Reddit over one year. We categorized the rule types by the behaviors they regulate. Our examination shows that rule developments, while prevalent and increasingly extensive overall, are more likely to happen in communities with certain topical interests, and concentrate on rules about issues such as copyright and quality. Rule development is also more associated with how fast a community is growing. We specifically explore how communities adjusted their rules to address new challenges like generative AI, investigating both the development and contents of AI-related policies. We reveal the nuanced relations between the developments of various AI-related rules and community characteristics such as size, age, community interest, timing of rule adoption, and neighboring subreddits. Specifically, larger and faster-growing communities are more likely to adopt AI-related rules. The community topical interests are strongly associated with whether its rules are restrictive or prescriptive. Neighboring communities have similar rule development patterns, a trend driven by shared topical interests and similar growth patterns as well as other contextual patterns. Overall, this study advances our understanding about how online communities dynamically evolve and refine their micro-level governance structures.