"Taking Care of a Fruit Tree": Nurturing as a Layer of Concern in Online Community Moderation
Open accessAbstract
Care in communities has a powerful influence on potentially disruptive social encounters. Practising care in moderation means exposing a group's core values, which, in turn, has the potential to strengthen identity and relationships in communities. Dissent is as inevitable in online communities as it is in their offline counterparts. However, dissent can be productive by sparking discussions that drive the evolution of community norms and boundaries, and there is value in understanding the role of moderation in this process. Our work draws on an exploratory analysis of moderation practices in the MetaFilter community, focusing on cases of intervention and response. We identify and analyse MetaFilter moderation with the metaphor: "taking care of a fruit tree", which is quoted from an interview with moderators on MetaFilter. We address the relevance of care as it is evidenced in these MetaFilter exchanges, and discuss what it might mean to approach an analysis of online moderation practices with a focus on nurturing care. We consider how HCI researchers might make use of care-as-nurture as a frame to identify multi-faceted and nuanced concepts characterising dissent and to develop tools for the sustainable support of online communities and their moderators.
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- Authors
- Yu, B., Seering, J., Spiel, K., & Watts, L.
- Affiliations
- University of Bath (GB)
- Carnegie Mellon University (US)
- University of Vienna (AT)
- Venue
- Extended Abstracts of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
- Publisher
- ACM
- Published
- 2020-04-25
- Pages
- 1-9
- OpenAlex
- W3014021838
- Cited by
- 22
- References
- 31
- Citations by year
- 2026: 6 · 2025: 4 · 2024: 3 · 2023: 3 · 2022: 3 · 2021: 2 · 2020: 1
- FWCI
- 1.64
- Type
- conference paper
- Language
- en
- Open access
- Locations
- CHI Conference Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI EA) (publishedVersion)
- Pure (University of Bath) (publishedVersion, other-oa)
- Topics
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Human-Computer Interaction › Innovative Human-Technology Interaction
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Hate Speech and Cyberbullying Detection
- Social Sciences › Communication › Social Media and Politics
- Keywords
- online community moderation, care, nurturing care, dissent, community norms, community identity, metaphor, moderators, online communities
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