Speaking as someone that’s done some Petty Internet Tyrant work in his time, rules-lawyering is a far worse problem than you’re giving it credit for. Even a large, experienced mod staff—which we don’t have—rarely has the time and leeway to define much of the attack surface, much less write rules to cover it; real-life legal systems only manage the same feat with the help of centuries of precedent and millions of man-hours of work, even in relatively small and well-defined domains.
The best first step is to think hard about what you’re incentivizing and make sure your users want what you want them to. If that doesn’t get you where you’re going, explicit rules and technical fixes can save you some time in common cases, but when it comes to gray areas the only practical approach is to cover everything with some variously subdivided version of “don’t be a dick” and then visibly enforce it. I have literally never seen anything else work.
Not to insult your work as a tyrant, but you were managing the wrong problem if you were spending your time trying to write ever-more specific rules. Rough rules are good; “Don’t be a dick” is perhaps too rough.
You don’t try to eliminate fuzzy edges; legal edge cases are fractal in nature, you’ll never finish drawing lines. You draw approximately where the lines are, without worrying about getting it exactly right, and just (metaphorically) shoot the people who jump up and down next to the line going “Not crossing, not crosssing!”. (Rule #1: There shall be no rule lawyering.) They’re not worth your time. For the people random-walking back and forth, exercise the same judgment as you would for “Don’t be a dick”, and enforce it just as visibly.
(It’s the visible enforcement there that matters.)
The rough lines aren’t there so rule lawyers know exactly what point they can push things to: They’re so the administrators can punish clear infractions without being accused of politicizing, because if the administrators need to step in, odds are there are sides forming if not formed, and a politicized punishment will only solidify those lines and fragment the community. (Eugine Nier is a great example of this.)
Standing just on this side of a line you’ve drawn is only a problem if you have a mod staff that’s way too cautious or too legalistic, which—judging from the Eugine debacle—may indeed be a problem that LW has. For most sites, though, that’s about the least challenging problem you’ll face short of a clear violation.
The cases you need to watch out for are the ones that’re clearly abusive but have nothing to do with any of the rules you worked out beforehand. And there are always going to be a lot of those. More of them the more and stricter your rules are (there’s the incentives thing again).
I’m aware there are ways of causing trouble that do not involve violating any rules.
I can do it without even violating the “Don’t be a dick” rule, personally. I once caused a blog to explode by being politely insistent the blog author was wrong, and being perfectly logical and consistently helpful about it. I think observers were left dumbfounded by the whole thing. I still occasionally find references to the aftereffects of the event on relevant corners of the internet. I was asked to leave, is the short of it. And then the problem got infinitely worse—because nobody could say what exactly I had done.
A substantial percentage of the blog’s readers left and never came back. The blog author’s significant other came in at some point in the mess, and I suspect their relationship ended as a result. I would guess the author in question probably had a nervous breakdown; it wouldn’t be the first, if so.
You’re right in that rules don’t help, at all, against certain classes of people. The solution is not to do away with rules, however, but to remember they’re not a complete solution.
I’m not saying we should do away with rules. I’m saying that there needs to be leeway to handle cases outside of the (specific) rules, with more teeth behind it than “don’t do it again”.
Rules are helpful. A ruleset outlines what you’re concerned with, and a good one nudges users toward behaving in prosocial ways. But the thing to remember is that rules, in a blog or forum context, are there to keep honest people honest. They’ll never be able to deal with serious malice on their own, not without spending far more effort on writing and adjudicating them than you’ll ever be able to spend, and in the worst cases they can even be used against you.
Speaking as someone that’s done some Petty Internet Tyrant work in his time, rules-lawyering is a far worse problem than you’re giving it credit for. Even a large, experienced mod staff—which we don’t have—rarely has the time and leeway to define much of the attack surface, much less write rules to cover it; real-life legal systems only manage the same feat with the help of centuries of precedent and millions of man-hours of work, even in relatively small and well-defined domains.
The best first step is to think hard about what you’re incentivizing and make sure your users want what you want them to. If that doesn’t get you where you’re going, explicit rules and technical fixes can save you some time in common cases, but when it comes to gray areas the only practical approach is to cover everything with some variously subdivided version of “don’t be a dick” and then visibly enforce it. I have literally never seen anything else work.
Not to insult your work as a tyrant, but you were managing the wrong problem if you were spending your time trying to write ever-more specific rules. Rough rules are good; “Don’t be a dick” is perhaps too rough.
You don’t try to eliminate fuzzy edges; legal edge cases are fractal in nature, you’ll never finish drawing lines. You draw approximately where the lines are, without worrying about getting it exactly right, and just (metaphorically) shoot the people who jump up and down next to the line going “Not crossing, not crosssing!”. (Rule #1: There shall be no rule lawyering.) They’re not worth your time. For the people random-walking back and forth, exercise the same judgment as you would for “Don’t be a dick”, and enforce it just as visibly.
(It’s the visible enforcement there that matters.)
The rough lines aren’t there so rule lawyers know exactly what point they can push things to: They’re so the administrators can punish clear infractions without being accused of politicizing, because if the administrators need to step in, odds are there are sides forming if not formed, and a politicized punishment will only solidify those lines and fragment the community. (Eugine Nier is a great example of this.)
Standing just on this side of a line you’ve drawn is only a problem if you have a mod staff that’s way too cautious or too legalistic, which—judging from the Eugine debacle—may indeed be a problem that LW has. For most sites, though, that’s about the least challenging problem you’ll face short of a clear violation.
The cases you need to watch out for are the ones that’re clearly abusive but have nothing to do with any of the rules you worked out beforehand. And there are always going to be a lot of those. More of them the more and stricter your rules are (there’s the incentives thing again).
I’m aware there are ways of causing trouble that do not involve violating any rules.
I can do it without even violating the “Don’t be a dick” rule, personally. I once caused a blog to explode by being politely insistent the blog author was wrong, and being perfectly logical and consistently helpful about it. I think observers were left dumbfounded by the whole thing. I still occasionally find references to the aftereffects of the event on relevant corners of the internet. I was asked to leave, is the short of it. And then the problem got infinitely worse—because nobody could say what exactly I had done.
A substantial percentage of the blog’s readers left and never came back. The blog author’s significant other came in at some point in the mess, and I suspect their relationship ended as a result. I would guess the author in question probably had a nervous breakdown; it wouldn’t be the first, if so.
You’re right in that rules don’t help, at all, against certain classes of people. The solution is not to do away with rules, however, but to remember they’re not a complete solution.
I’m not saying we should do away with rules. I’m saying that there needs to be leeway to handle cases outside of the (specific) rules, with more teeth behind it than “don’t do it again”.
Rules are helpful. A ruleset outlines what you’re concerned with, and a good one nudges users toward behaving in prosocial ways. But the thing to remember is that rules, in a blog or forum context, are there to keep honest people honest. They’ll never be able to deal with serious malice on their own, not without spending far more effort on writing and adjudicating them than you’ll ever be able to spend, and in the worst cases they can even be used against you.