Millions of online communities are governed by volunteer moderators, who shape their communities by setting and enforcing rules, recruiting additional moderators, and participating in the community themselves. These moderators must regularly make decisions about how to govern, yet it is challenging to determine what governance strategies are most successful, as measuring the `success' of governance is complex and nuanced. Furthermore, the incredible diversity in community topic, size, and membership all but guarantee that there is no `one-size-fits-all' solution for community governance. In this work, we measure governance by assessing how community members publicly discuss their own moderators. We quantify perceptions of moderators through 1.89 million labeled posts and comments made on reddit over an 18 month period, and relate these perceptions to characteristics of community governance and to different actions that community moderators can take. We identify key differences between different types of communities, and highlight promising strategies for moderator teams. Amongst other findings, we show that positive perceptions of moderators are associated with other measures of community health, and that strict rule enforcement is perceived more favorably for certain topics, such as news communities, than others. We investigate what kinds of moderators have the most positive impact on the community when they join the mod team, and find that moderators who are active community members before and during their mod tenures result in the largest improvement of community members' perceptions of moderators. We make all our models, datasets, and code public.

翻译：数百万在线社区由志愿者版主管理，他们通过制定和执行规则、招募新版主以及自身参与社区活动来塑造社区。版主需要定期做出治理决策，但由于衡量治理“成功”的复杂性及细微差异，确定最有效的治理策略极具挑战性。此外，社区主题、规模和成员构成的巨大多样性，几乎决定了社区治理不存在“一刀切”的解决方案。本研究通过评估社区成员公开讨论其版主的方式，对治理进行度量。我们利用Reddit上18个月期间标记的189万条帖子和评论，量化了版主感知，并将其与社区治理特征及版主可采取的不同行动相关联。我们识别出不同类型社区之间的关键差异，并重点介绍了版主团队的有效策略。研究发现，对版主的积极感知与社区健康度的其他指标相关；而在某些主题（如新闻社区）中，严格规则执行带来的感知评价优于其他主题。我们还探究了加入版主团队时对社区产生最积极影响的版主类型，发现版主任职前后均保持活跃社区成员身份的版主，能最大程度提升社区成员对版主的感知。我们已公开所有模型、数据集及代码。