Rule Development in Online Communities Amidst Growth and Generative AI

Online community moderators continually adapt their rules to meet changing realities. The dynamics of these micro-level governance actions reflect various community needs and strategies in online moderation. Understanding how online communities adapt their moderation rules as they grow and face new threats, like Generative AI content, could reveal the micro-governance mechanisms that keep user-driven platforms functional and our digital platforms reliable and resilient.This study analyzes the moderation rule changes in response to both precedent and emerging challenges across over five thousand communities on Reddit over one year.We categorized the rule types by what behaviors they regulated. Our examination shows that the rule developments, while prevalent and increasingly extensive overall, were more likely to happen in communities with certain topic interests, and concentrated on rules about topics such as copyright and quality.Rule development is also more associated with how fast a community is growing, and less by its size.We further explore how communities adjusted their rules to address the new challenge like generative AI, investigating both the development and contents of AI-related policies.We reveal the nuanced relations between the developments of various AI-related rules and community characteristics like size, age, community interest, timing of rule adoption, and neighboring subreddits. By analyzing rule development patterns in both routine and novel situations, this study advances the understanding about how online communities dynamically evolve and refine their micro-level governance structures.