> It's like people don't get that arbitrary and shifting rules with inconsistent enforcement are by design, so as to make the people subject to them police themselves, which is more effective at managing a community than real rules.
Or maybe just enforcing community standards is really hard and often you find cases that are obviously wrong and harmful but don't fall under the enumerated list of rules that are broken.
Making rules for punishment is really really hard. How hard? Look at the entire study of law. Arbitrary decisions fill in the gaps.
It is not reasonable to expect a small company running a small community for a free product to offer a professional arbitration equivalent to legal professionals.
I'd conjecture that all systems necessarily grow from simple rules and die of complex ones. The inflection point where enforcement becomes inconsistent is the inflection point on growth.
The Vivaldi rules are in fact simple, with the exception of what seems like a wrongthink clause that crosses services, which is like a notwithstanding/wish-for-more-wishes rule. The BDFL model of open source worked for this at limited scales, where a person is making a decision and taking responsibility for it. Facebook almost succeeded in doing this well with their public board of censors, but really, once you make it a committee, it launders accountability and becomes arbitrary again.
Regarding the study of law, if you want corruption and inescapable suffering, create complex and inconsistent rules.
Twitter also could have done a good job when Dorsey had a kind of royal assent that legitimized decisions but he seemed to give that up. Agrawal has a brief opportunity to set good precedents as well. The objection I think most people have to censorship is when the censors don't take ownership of the decision, as then it's basically gaslighting.
Rules and punishment are simple, provided they roll up to a person enforcing them. When you move from that, you get a system that is easily gamed, a kind of star chamber, and then most of your effort as a platform owner goes into fighting the tiny minority of people who game the system at the expense of the rest. It's so dumb and obvious that it can only be on purpose.
Or maybe just enforcing community standards is really hard and often you find cases that are obviously wrong and harmful but don't fall under the enumerated list of rules that are broken.
Making rules for punishment is really really hard. How hard? Look at the entire study of law. Arbitrary decisions fill in the gaps.
It is not reasonable to expect a small company running a small community for a free product to offer a professional arbitration equivalent to legal professionals.