J. Nathan Matias

J. Nathan Matias is a researcher who pioneered community-led field experiments in platform governance, much of it conducted in partnership with Reddit communities. He is an assistant professor at Cornell University in the departments of Communication and Information Science, and founder and director of the Citizens and Technology Lab. He began the project as CivilServant during his PhD at the MIT Media Lab and Center for Civic Media, moving it to Cornell in 2019.

His best-known Reddit study was a randomized experiment run with the moderators of r/science, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 2019. By automatically posting community-rule reminders atop some discussion threads but not others across thousands of conversations, the experiment found that displaying the rules increased rule compliance by newcomers and raised newcomer participation. The work demonstrated experimentally that making social norms visible can shape behaviour at scale in a large online community, and it became a frequently cited example of moderators and researchers collaborating directly.

Matias has also written on the civic labour of volunteer moderators and on the use of field experiments as a method for holding technology platforms accountable, including a 2018 CHI paper describing CivilServant as community-led experimentation in platform governance. His approach emphasises running studies with communities rather than on them, with moderators as partners who control the intervention.

A public advocate for independent, citizen-driven evaluation of online platforms, Matias studied literature at the University of Cambridge before completing his doctorate at MIT. His research is often referenced in discussions about whether platform interventions actually work and about who should have the power to test and measure them.