Why would you possibly want a contract of anything enforced by the spirit instead of the letter? The whole point of a contract is to be explicit, to spell things out. If you're going to enforce social norms according to their spirit (and you should!), writing out a pseudolegal code is a waste of everyone's time (and, in my experience, actively harmful to the social health of your community).
I don’t know if you’re actually looking for an answer, but after having managed a small 1,000 person community I think the “spirt of the law” makes a lot of sense. You’ll get a few community members that are great, but then they want to be helpful and will start trying to micromanage other community members. They’ll see a rule like “Please keep discussions on topic for the channel”. And then if somebody asks a question about C++ in the programming channel (instead of the C++ channel) the “helpful” member will tell the person that they’re posting their question in the wrong channel.
As the manager/moderator of a community, I appreciate that this person is just trying to help. However, having somebody disregard your question and then tell you you’re doing stuff wrong can be a major turnoff to newcomers. In this specific case, it’s against the spirit of the rules because it’s a one off scenario. Now, this rule is helpful for the members that like to post memes everywhere, or talk about school or politics or religion in random channels. For these repeat offenders, I can point to the rule and politely ask them to move the discussions to a more appropriate channel. As with all laws in even real life, the rules are great for the black and white areas, but the majority of situations are gray. And it’s in those gray situations where we can operate within the spirit of the rules rather than the letter of the law.
Edit: also, to respond to your last statement. The code of conduct is there so that moderators have something to reference to repeat offenders. It’s much easier to tell somebody they’re banned because they repeatedly broke a specific rule rather than ban somebody because of personal distaste. I don’t see how having a code of conduct could ever be harmful to a community? How would that harm a community in any way?
> The code of conduct is there so that moderators have something to reference to repeat offenders. It’s much easier to tell somebody they’re banned because they repeatedly broke a specific rule rather than ban somebody because of personal distaste. I don’t see how having a code of conduct could ever be harmful to a community? How would that harm a community in any way?
It harms the community precisely because it's easier. A moderator will ban someone they don't like, blame it on something ambiguous they twist into a code of conduct violation, other people will point out that there's a double standard because they didn't ban someone else who broke the same rule much more clearly, pretty soon allegations of discrimination are flying.... And you also get the opposite problem where a moderator won't ban someone who's doing a lot of harm to the community because "well, they technically haven't broken the rules yet...".
Actually applying human judgement and taking responsibility for it is psychologically harder, but it's vital for moderation that's actually going to work and be respected, IME. I think we're pretty much on the same page about what moderators should actually do with what you said about "grey situations" and "spirit of the rules". But if you pretend you're following a clear written code when you're actually expecting to have a lot of ambiguity and exercise personal judgement, you're creating a mismatch of expectations that causes problems (like your example of community members micromanaging each other). Better, IME to make it clear that while you may have some agreed guidelines, moderation isn't going to be according to a legal code.
> Better, IME to make it clear that while you may have some agreed guidelines, moderation isn't going to be according to a legal code.
Yes. Some would say, it’s almost like using the spirit of the rules ;)
In all seriousness, your theoretical example of why code of conduct can be harmful to a community has nothing to do with the code of conduct. It sounds like it’s just an unhealthy community with unhealthy moderators. Remove the code of conduct and the same scenario would play out. The only difference would be members crying out about how one member was banned for such a reason and another member who did the same thing wasn’t banned.
And lastly, in my community at least, it doesn’t come down to personal judgment. Unless a user is spamming or spewing racial slurs, the moderators meet and discuss whether or not the behavior of the user is ban-worthy, temp ban-worthy, or inconsequential (in the former case, the moderator who notices such abrasive action can take immediate action). This way we can at least remove some level of bias by ensuring that there’s consensus.
Who knows, my community might just be small enough and inactive enough that I haven’t run into the flaws of the code of conduct. This is all off topic anyways though, so I’ll leave it at that.
> Some would say, it’s almost like using the spirit of the rules ;)
Well, yes, but if your "rules" are intended to be applied more as sort of guidelines, then better to call them that and have everyone be on the same page.
> In all seriousness, your theoretical example of why code of conduct can be harmful to a community has nothing to do with the code of conduct. It sounds like it’s just an unhealthy community with unhealthy moderators. Remove the code of conduct and the same scenario would play out.
It's not a theoretical example, it's a real experience from a community I was part of, and the breakdown happened immediately after the code was introduced. Bad moderators will be bad with or without a code and good moderators will be good with or without a code, but in reality most moderators are somewhere in the middle, and these details can make a difference on the margin. Just like even though locks don't stop professional thieves, locking your door makes a big difference as most theft is opportunistic.
> Unless a user is spamming or spewing racial slurs, the moderators meet and discuss whether or not the behavior of the user is ban-worthy, temp ban-worthy, or inconsequential (in the former case, the moderator who notices such abrasive action can take immediate action). This way we can at least remove some level of bias by ensuring that there’s consensus.
That kind of process sounds like a good thing. IME thinking through and tuning the procedures of how you moderate is a lot more productive than spending time codifying the "what" that you think you're moderating.
