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Part of what makes it so rigorous is how formal it is, with that business of deciding in advance what the criteria of success will be. That in turn requires a certain amount of serious thinking about social phenomena, and actually getting explicit about things that, frankly, usually just get hand waved through when we're talking about social media platforms. Questions like "what even do we expect our moderators to be achieving?"

It means doing hard things like asking, "Okay, we want people to 'feel more safe': how will we be able to tell that people are feeling more (or less) 'safe'? If people were feeling more or less safe, how would we know? How would we be able to measure it? To observe it in the data? What is it that we are assuming will change in people's behavior based on how safe they feel?"

In the social sciences, this is called "operationalizing" an abstraction or concept or feeling.

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