Reddit's 10^7-user communities reveal scaling laws for governance

A new arXiv study by Bhattacharya et al. quantifies how Reddit communities govern themselves as they grow from 100 to 10 million members. Analyzing user-to-user interactions, top-down enforcement, and automated bot actions, the researchers discovered that regulatory efforts scale with community size following consistent power laws. Peer interaction and enforcement exhibit superlinear scaling with exponents of 1.12 to 1.18, meaning larger communities require disproportionately more human moderation. Automated bot oversight, in contrast, scales nearly linearly (beta ≈0.95), suggesting bots remain effective at constant relative effort regardless of size.

The study also identifies three empirically grounded governance modes: Intensity (explaining 54% of variance) captures how much regulation occurs per user; One-way vs Two-way Communication (25%) distinguishes top-down directives from peer-level dialogue; and Impersonal vs Personal Moderation (21%) separates automated from human-led actions. Temporal analysis reveals that increasing regulatory intensity is most often absorbed by one-way coordination (e.g., announcements or bans) rather than reciprocal engagement. These patterns align with Ostrom's principles for commons governance and organizational theories of bureaucratic vs. discretionary control, offering a quantitative framework for understanding how online communities maintain order at scale.