To be clear, not talking about this community, obviously ๐.
What's the point of writing down rules, if mods just do what they want? But I suppose that's the risk you take when you call someone a liar in a small community; they might be a mod.
Edit: I'm not trying to say that mods suck, they perform a useful and often thankless job. Just that it can be difficult for small communities to get a healthy number of good mods, which can become a problem.
A ttrpg called .dungeon got a remaster recently and I keep coming back to one of the screenshots on the store page, because I'm such a big fan of the rules for community moderation it enumerated:
#5 is the worst rule there. I've been called that for the most milquetoast of statements. You really have to be more specific. This community sounds like an annoying pain to be a part of tbh, I don't have time to feel like I'm stepping on glass every day
Stop lickin boots then
Nothing says "well-moderated community" quite like vague, easy-to-bend rules!
Nothing says bootlicking by applying the same bad-faith thinking you accuse others of having without caring about the fact that humanity has had to operate on good faith the entire time it's existed.
Define "bootlicking" please.
Antidisestablishmentarianism. That's functionally what it is.
That should be in the rules instead of "bootlicking," then. Well-defined rules make it harder to enforce them unfairly. The fewer questions the community has to ask about guidelines, the easier it is to follow them.
Thank you for answering in good faith, by the way.
Bootlicking's easier for people to type and say, and most people do have an understanding of what it means. It's just not really officially codified yet.
And it's all good. There is far too much bad faith bullshit going on on this platform that goes unabated for me to not at least try to speak in good faith. I wish the others would learn to do the same. ๐คฆ
It may be easier to type and say (as are most words in comparison), but "antidisestablishmentarianism" has a well-defined meaning that would make for a less-vague rule. "Bootlicking" means a lot of different things to a lot of people, and not all of those people have common sense, to put it nicely. I've been called a bootlicker for saying I don't want to tear down the entirety of every government everywhere, ever, for instance, which I imagine isn't what that rule is trying to convey.
There's a reason "legalese" is the language laws are written in. It's very specific, with any potentially ambiguous words given clear definitions before any of the rest of the law is presented (at least that's the intent in the US, anyway). If you were to, say, define "bootlicker" in the beginning of the rules to mean "excessive praise for police violence," then I'd say it's quite safe to use elsewhere in said document. Leaving such a vague word undefined in what amounts to a paralegal document opens up avenues for abusive interpretation, both from moderators and community members.
TL;DR: Clear definitions of what your rules mean leads to a healthier, easier to moderate community overall.