When making more rules just makes things worse

On a technicality

Apropos of nothing, I'd like to tell you a story. I've touched on this before, but this is the full version. It's the story of hypothetical small-to-medium Internet community. You create a little community for a thing you like. You give it a phpBB forum or something.

eev.ee

This is a really great post @greenie shared with me about community management—and specifically, about the rules you create for community management, and it's something that's close to our hearts here at Imzy.

Before we had even built an alpha version of the site to start user testing little pieces of it, we had already built out the majority of our community policy, a robust document we are pretty proud of. We've been as specific as we could in this policy, but you'll notice that it's still not perfectly explicit.

And that's intentional.

Because it's impossible.

As Eevee explains:

I think we forget that even real laws are somewhat subjective, often hinging on intent. There are entire separate crimes for homicide, depending on whether it was intentional or accidental or due to clear neglect. These things get decided by a judge or a jury and become case law, the somewhat murky extra rules that aren’t part of formal law but are binding nonetheless.

That's why, for example, our definition of pornography is "imagery whose primary or sole purpose is sexual arousal." It's focused on the intent. Because there can be appropriate nudity in news photos, National Geographic images, great works of art, etc. There is also plenty of inappropriate and pornographic content that doesn’t expose very specific parts of the body or have full nudity. Most of the time, you know what the difference is. Creating a more specific rule than that means that it's easy to evade and post pornographic content that technically isn't against the rules, and prevents other users from posting great content that might enrich communities and contribute to great discussions.

And in reality, getting more specific doesn't usually fix the problem, for the community managers or the members. Again quoting Eevee:

Fixing this in rules is a hard problem. The obvious approach is to add increasingly specific details, though then you risk catching innocent behaviors, and you can end up stuck in an almost comical game of cat-and-mouse where you keep trying to find ways to edit your own rules so you’re allowed to punish someone you’ve already passed judgment on.

They end up constricting communities more and more, catching innocent users in the crossfire because they unintentionally did something that's technically against the rules even though everyone would basically agree it's okay. And the people who are acting maliciously can always figure out the small loopholes to just evade being banned, and then suddenly all the good people are being punished and all the bad people are sticking around being jerks.

The better solution is to have policies that set a standard of behavior based on broader principles and intentions, and then be as transparent as possible in the application of those standards.

This is one area where a lot of people/sites/platforms/communities/etc mess up. When no one knows when or why people will be banned, why they were banned themselves, or even that they were banned at all, that creates a huge community problem. That's why:

  • whenever any staff or community leader on Imzy removes a post or comment or bans a user, they are required to include a reason
  • we say if a post has been "removed" by someone else or just "deleted" by the user
  • we make posts like this one, and this, and this
  • one of the things on our to-do list is also to include a public leader log that will allow users to understand more what is happening in their community and why, so community members can learn what is and isn't acceptable and leaders can be held accountable
  • another thing on our list is to give leaders the option to include the reason why a post/comment was removed publicly so that if someone does have a link to it, they can know why it's disappeared.

Transparency is a huge part in creating trust and creating user commitment. More importantly, transparency allows members to know where and how they can have an impact, and feeling like you can make a difference allows you to feel a sense of ownership and responsibility for that community. And when each user feels both the impetus and empowerment to make a difference in the community, you end up with a really fantastic community.

But the reality is, right now we have around 28,000 members. And things are going to get messy once we launch publicly, no matter how much we prepare and how awesome our community team is (and seriously, they're awesome). Because that's what happens over time and especially as you grow.

So we need all of your help in creating a place that's as good as it can be and helping to set the right examples of behavior, helping to educate other users, helping to report inappropriate content, and most of all, haivng patience with us and trusting us as we grow that when we make mistakes, we're doing so with the best intentions and improving as we go. We know we won't always get it perfect, but we'll sure as hell try our best, and with your help, we think we'll get there. :) We're doing our best to empower you to do your best—but we're also placing the impetus on you to do so. Imzy is yours. Make it awesome.

(Full disclosure: I originally posted this here, but I thought the people in this community would be interested in discussing this as well, and I'd love to hear people's thoughts on this topic!)