Community rules are hierarchical
Think about the diversity of Internet users. Even such a large group has its own fundamental cultural rules. For example, the Internet does not like censorship and encourages the spread of information (preferably with proper attribution). These cultural norms are in the internet’s blood. At the same time, each individual website adds its own rules: restrictions on the topic, format, language of the content, and etc. We can present it as a kind of hierarchical branching: the more focused the community is, the more rules (explicit and implicit) it has.
For example, let us look at Stack Exchange, which is no exception. CoC, ToS and the User Agreement are basic rules for all communities on the platform. All network communities are separated by professional profile: from cooking to photography to programming. The culture of any industry often affects people and the way they interact no less than the culture of the country in which they live. Therefore, community members together create a set of rules, in addition to the basic ones, that help maintain a comfortable inclusive atmosphere on the site.
The rules in different communities may and most likely will vary. As a result If something is allowed in one community, it does not mean that it should be allowed in your one. For example, the issue of respect, as it seems to me, is much more important in the Russian-speaking environment than in the English-speaking one. As a result, at the very beginning of Stack Overflow in Russian, to the addition of the “be-nice” policy, we added “be-friendly”, which is mandatory to follow, regardless of how things are on Stack Overflow in English.
Community rules are the result of a collective effort
When you see a violation of the rules, it is very important to communicate to the troublemaker the legitimacy of your request to stop. Nothing convinces better than a collectively agreed rule, which is located somewhere in a public place.
The Law of the Twelve Tables
In ancient Rome many of the laws were unwritten or unavailable for regular people to see, as a result there was much room for corruption. People eventually made the official writing some laws on stone tablets for everyone to see.
It’s great when abusive content gets deleted from a website, it is even better when regular users take an active part in it. In this case, at least two people (the user who flags a post and and a moderator validating the flag) look at the case. Collective moderation is a feedback-loop: The more a site is moderated by regular users, the more a user feels a sense of belonging. Sense of belonging to the community leads to even more engagement and moderation of the site and a greater sense of belonging...
As it was said, to convince a troublemaker of the counter-productivity of their actions is much easier if the community moderates a site collectively. For example, if a moderator contacts the troublemaker after validating a flag, it is a collective expression of protest against the violation and it is perceived differently:
Hello,
Members of our community have flagged several of your posts as violating the rules of this site... Here are the rules:
- { link to a meta post }
- { link to a meta post }
- …
When you ask, answer or comment on the site please make sure that you are following the rules of this community. If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to ask them on meta or in the response to this message.
Community Moderator Team
Social economics: Bad behavior leads degradation of the community
The knowledge base is the result of the interaction of community members. These interactions and the created sense of belonging define the community and create a so called social economy where the product is the community and the capital is the respect and trust between the users. If a user does something positive to another user of the community, not only the latter, but the whole community will benefit from it: the atmosphere in the community improves, a positive role model is set, and etc. For any such economic model to work it is critical that each user believes in it (and follows the rules).
Ignoring violations leads to "negative social capital", or in other words to insults, and not as much to the author of aggression, but to the whole community (for example, no one says “John Doe is unfriendly”, everyone says “the community is unfriendly”). The main goal of community moderation is to prevent this from happening as much as possible.
We can say that if on a site:
- Community actively moderates the site
- Community moderators contact troublemakers when needed and communicate them the problem in a clear way.
- Community rules available at a public place.
The phrases like “I always have been doing that there” do not work because every community member knows that “there is not here”.
