Platform dialectics: The relationships between volunteer moderators and end users on reddit

Abstract

Existing literature on the affordances of Internet platforms rarely examines the complex and recursive relationships between the actions of volunteer moderators and the behaviour of end users. Building on existing studies of Internet communities, affordances and ‘public goods’, this article uses an ethnographic approach to analyse two subreddits, r/paleo and r/nootropics, on the social news site reddit. It elaborates on work by Massanari to illustrate how the moderators of forums with an epistemic focus utilise the affordances at their disposal with the aim of mediating trust and establishing a paradigm for constructive discourse. End users respond to these attempts in unpredictable and unforeseen ways, indicating the interpretive flexibility of affordances. The concept of ‘platform dialectics’ is invoked as an overarching description of this phenomenon.