On reflection, I think there is value in BOTH publishing official rules/guidelines that describe moderator actions and the rationale behind when they’ll be used, AND unofficial “norms”, which is prediction of what is likely to be upvoted and get good engagement, and what is likely to be downvoted and not generate useful discussion.
The key is that official things are NORMATIVE—they include a top-down demand and specify enforcement actions. It doesn’t need to be (and IMO shouldn’t be) algorithmic-level specific—there’s still space for human judgement, but those humans are identified as special roles within the site, not the general populace. Norms are NOT official, and any description of them is POSITIVE—it’s a prediction of what unofficial crowd reactions will be.
Norms tend to be FAR more contextual and uneven than rules, even fairly loose rules. Norms are far less legible, as there’s no authority to keep them consistent or understandable. Norms are generally less egalatarian than rules, as crowds tend to weight popularity and individual fame more highly than rules do.
Mostly, I think it’s great to give newbies more advice, and it’s great to give mods an easier job, but both of those jobs become much harder if you don’t acknowledge that there are multiple different kinds of evaluation which are applied to posts and comments.
On reflection, I think there is value in BOTH publishing official rules/guidelines that describe moderator actions and the rationale behind when they’ll be used, AND unofficial “norms”, which is prediction of what is likely to be upvoted and get good engagement, and what is likely to be downvoted and not generate useful discussion.
The key is that official things are NORMATIVE—they include a top-down demand and specify enforcement actions. It doesn’t need to be (and IMO shouldn’t be) algorithmic-level specific—there’s still space for human judgement, but those humans are identified as special roles within the site, not the general populace. Norms are NOT official, and any description of them is POSITIVE—it’s a prediction of what unofficial crowd reactions will be.
Norms tend to be FAR more contextual and uneven than rules, even fairly loose rules. Norms are far less legible, as there’s no authority to keep them consistent or understandable. Norms are generally less egalatarian than rules, as crowds tend to weight popularity and individual fame more highly than rules do.
Mostly, I think it’s great to give newbies more advice, and it’s great to give mods an easier job, but both of those jobs become much harder if you don’t acknowledge that there are multiple different kinds of evaluation which are applied to posts and comments.