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Building on existing studies of Internet communities, affordances and \u2018public goods\u2019, this article uses an ethnographic approach to analyse two subreddits, r\/paleo and r\/nootropics, on the social news site reddit. It elaborates on work by Massanari to illustrate how the moderators of forums with an epistemic focus utilise the affordances at their disposal with the aim of mediating trust and establishing a paradigm for constructive discourse. End users respond to these attempts in unpredictable and unforeseen ways, indicating the interpretive flexibility of affordances. The concept of \u2018platform dialectics\u2019 is invoked as an overarching description of this phenomenon.<\/jats:p>","DOI":"10.1177\/1461444819834317","type":"journal-article","created":{"date-parts":[[2019,3,14]],"date-time":"2019-03-14T07:11:40Z","timestamp":1552547500000},"page":"1910-1927","update-policy":"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1177\/sage-journals-update-policy","source":"Crossref","is-referenced-by-count":61,"title":["Platform dialectics: The relationships between volunteer moderators and end users on reddit"],"prefix":"10.1177","volume":"21","author":[{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0003-1832-572X","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Tim","family":"Squirrell","sequence":"first","affiliation":[{"name":"The University of Edinburgh, UK"}],"role":[{"role":"author","vocabulary":"crossref"}]}],"member":"179","published-online":{"date-parts":[[2019,3,14]]},"reference":[{"key":"bibr1-1461444819834317","unstructured":"Alexander S (2016) Slate star codex. 2016 Nootropics survey results. 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