Institutional Convergence or Ecological Divergence? The Evolution of Communities on Reddit

• In Event: Organizations, Occupations, and Work Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (90 minute): Table 14: Platforms and Participants

Abstract

Decentralized community governance is often proposed as a democratic antidote to platform centralization. However, this rests on a precarious assumption: that communities can maintain structural diversity against the isomorphic pressures of the digital platform. If communities inevitably converge on identical rules, decentralized governance becomes a mirage—replicating the very bureaucracy it seeks to replace.
This study tests the structural survival of digital pluralism using a longitudinal panel of 18.8 million dyadic observations and 268,000 governance rules from Reddit (2008–2023). Bridging neo-institutional theory and organizational ecology, we employ Large Language Models (Claude 3.5 Sonnet) and high-dimensional vector embeddings to map the evolution of community governance.
Our results reveal the closing of a "digital iron cage." We find robust evidence of coercive, mimetic, and normative isomorphism: as communities scale, they abandon local idiosyncrasies and converge toward a universal, platform-wide administrative template. Contrary to ecological theories of niche differentiation, communities do not partition governance resources; instead, the "shadow of the ban" and peer mimicry drive massive homogenization.
Having established that governance structures are converging, the next phase of this project investigates the democratic consequences of this isomorphism. We are currently analyzing downstream discourse data to determine whether this structural standardization reduces toxicity and discrimination, or if it merely stifles legitimate minority expression. Ultimately, we ask whether the "safe" internet is necessarily a less democratic one.

Authors

• Yuanhao (Colin) Liu, Johns Hopkins University

• Katherine Van Koevering, Whiting School of Engineering, Johns Hopkins University