Rules are vital for building a safe and healthy functioning online community, and Reddit is no exception. For community moderators, however, it can be difficult to make data-driven decisions on what rules are best for their community.
A team of researchers in the Allen School’s Social Futures Lab and Behavioral Data Science Lab conducted the largest-to-date analysis of rules on Reddit looking at over 67,000 rules and their evolution across more than 5,000 communities over a period of five years — accounting for almost 70% of all content on the platform. This study is the first to connect Reddit rules to community outcomes. They found that rules on who participates, how content is formatted and tagged as well as rules about commercial activities were the most strongly associated with community members speaking positively about how their community is governed.
The team presented their work titled “Reddit Rules and Rulers: Quantifying the Link Between Rules and Perceptions of Governance Across Thousands of Communities” at the 2025 International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM 2025) in June and received the sole Best Paper Award out of 138 papers.
“This was my first paper, and I am extremely grateful for it to be named best paper of ICWSM 2025,” said lead author Leon Liebmann (B.S., ‘25), now at the online privacy company Westbold. “The work was difficult at times, and my advisors and co-authors Allen School Ph.D. student Galen Weld and professor Tim Althoff provided me with the direction and methods I needed to get it done. These people shaped my time in the Allen School and gave me a love for research I’d love to revisit.”
To better understand the rules on Reddit, the team first had to map out which communities had what rules and when. The researchers developed a retrieval-augmented GPT-4o model to classify rules into different categories based on their target, tone and topic. They then assessed the rules based on how common they were and how they varied across different communities, and also collected timelines on how the communities’ rules changed over time. At the same time, the researchers used a classification pipeline to identify posts and comments discussing community governance.
Taken together, this study can help inform Reddit moderators and community leaders on what rules their communities should have. The researchers found that the most common rules across communities covered post content, spam and low quality content, and respect for others — guidelines that platforms could use to create “starter packs” for new communities. They also found that how moderators word rules could influence how positively or negatively communities view their governance. For example, prescriptive rules, or those that describe what community members should do, are viewed more favorably than restrictive rules that focus on what community members should not do. By choosing to phrase rules prescriptively, moderators can help communities have a positive view of their governance.
In addition to Leibmann, Weld and Althoff, Allen School professor Amy X. Zhang was also a co-author on the paper.
Read the full paper here and the datasets for Reddit rules and outcomes are available here.