The Online Community Management Triad - Managerial Dynamics of Community Admins in the Age of Algorithms

Online communities have gained prominence in recent years. With their growth in numbers, there has been an increasing challenge to enforce rules and community guidelines. Many community platforms have introduced AI to take over specific managerial duties from the human admins to address this challenge. In this paper, we study this new form of online community hybrid management. To do so, we draw on classical sociological theory and employ Simmel's concept of the triad (1950), which details the dynamics of the social relations between three actors, modifying it to include a non-human actor, namely machine learning algorithms, and employing it in a qualitative study of Facebook Groups. This triadic approach to analyze current online community management dynamics can help increase our understanding of human-algorithms co-management, particularly in online communities and shed light on broader challenges and opportunities in implementing algorithmic management in social environments.