Many researchers studying online social communities seek to make such communities better. However, understanding what 'better' means is challenging, due to the divergent opinions of community members, and the multitude of possible community values which often conflict with one another. Community members' own values for their communities are not well understood, and how these values align with one another is an open question. Previous research has mostly focused on specific and comparatively well-defined harms within online communities, such as harassment, rule-breaking, and misinformation. In this work, we ask 39 community members on reddit to describe their values for their communities. We gather 301 responses in members' own words, spanning 125 unique communities, and use iterative categorization to produce a taxonomy of 29 different community values across 9 major categories. We find that members value a broad range of topics ranging from technical features to the diversity of the community, and most frequently prioritize content quality. We identify important understudied topics such as content quality and community size, highlight where values conflict with one another, and call for research into governance methods for communities that protect vulnerable members.

中文翻译：

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让在线社区“更好”：Reddit 上的社区价值观分类

许多研究在线社交社区的研究人员试图让这些社区变得更好。然而，由于社区成员的不同意见，以及经常相互冲突的众多可能的社区价值观，理解“更好”的含义是具有挑战性的。社区成员对他们社区的价值观没有得到很好的理解，这些价值观如何相互协调是一个悬而未决的问题。先前的研究主要集中在在线社区中特定且相对明确的危害上，例如骚扰、违反规则和错误信息。在这项工作中，我们要求 Reddit 上的 39 位社区成员描述他们对社区的价值观。我们用会员自己的话收集了 301 条回复，跨越 125 个独特的社区，并使用迭代分类法生成跨 9 个主要类别的 29 个不同社区价值的分类法。我们发现成员重视广泛的主题，从技术特征到社区的多样性，最常见的是优先考虑内容质量。我们确定重要的未研究主题，例如内容质量和社区规模，突出价值观相互冲突的地方，并呼吁研究保护弱势成员的社区治理方法。