As you say, we already have informal norms. And those norms determine what gets upvoted/downvoted, and also what moderators may take action on. To the extent those norms exist and getting acted on already, it seems pretty good to me to try to express them explicitly.
I think the challenge might be accurately communicating what enforcement of the norms looks like so people aren’t afraid of the wrong thing. I can see not warning them enough (if we lied and said there’s no possibility of banning ever), or warning them too much and they think we scrutinize every comment.
Seems hard, because I want to say “yes, if you fail at too many of these, we will give you a warning, and then a rate limit, and eventually ban you”, that’s a necessary part of maintaining a garden, but we also want people to not get too afraid.
Also currently we plan to experiment with “automoderation” where, for example, users with negative karma get rate-limited, and seems good to be able to automatically send them and say “very likely you’re getting downvoted for doing something on <list> wrong”.
As you say, we already have informal norms. And those norms determine what gets upvoted/downvoted, and also what moderators may take action on. To the extent those norms exist and getting acted on already, it seems pretty good to me to try to express them explicitly.
I think the challenge might be accurately communicating what enforcement of the norms looks like so people aren’t afraid of the wrong thing. I can see not warning them enough (if we lied and said there’s no possibility of banning ever), or warning them too much and they think we scrutinize every comment.
Seems hard, because I want to say “yes, if you fail at too many of these, we will give you a warning, and then a rate limit, and eventually ban you”, that’s a necessary part of maintaining a garden, but we also want people to not get too afraid.
Also currently we plan to experiment with “automoderation” where, for example, users with negative karma get rate-limited, and seems good to be able to automatically send them and say “very likely you’re getting downvoted for doing something on <list> wrong”.