Adopting third-party bots for managing online communities

DOI

Bots have become critical to the management of communities on platforms, especially to match the growing scale and technical sophistication of online harms. However, community leaders often adopt third-party bots, creating room for misalignment in their assumptions, expectations, and understandings (i.e., their technological frames) about them. On platforms where the sharing of bots can be extremely valuable, how community leaders can revise their frames about bots to more effectively adopt them is unclear. In this work, we conducted a qualitative interview study with 16 community leaders on Discord examining how they adopt third-party bots. We found that participants addressed challenges stemming from uncertainties about a bot's security, reliability, and fit through social ecosystems that emerged around bots. Formal and informal opportunities to discuss bots with others across the platform enabled participants to revise their technological frames over time, closing gaps in bot-specific skills and knowledge. This social process shifted participants' perspectives of the labor of bot adoption into something that was satisfying and fun, underscoring the value of collaborative and communal approaches to adopting bots. Finally, by shaping participants' mental models of the nature, value, and use of bots, these social ecosystems raise some practical tensions in how they supported and constrained participants. Together, the social nature of adopting third-party bots in our interviews offer insight into how we can better support the sharing of user-facing tools across online communities.