Rules Are Irrelevant For A Community

When you go to a bar, do you read the rules of the establishment before you enter?

What about a café? Restaurant? Sports stadium?

In fact, when was the last time you read the rules for anything, ever? Can you even imagine a line of people reading the rules before they enter an establishment? It would take forever to get inside. 

Yet, even without these rules, we usuall manage not to steal everything and trash the place. 

I’m amazed that there is so much discussion about what to include in the rules of a community platform. We’re not on the same planet as our members when we think like this. New members don’t read the rules. No one does. It may be comforting (and legally useful) to have them, but lets not pretend they do anything to change behaviour.

What are the rules for using Facebook? Twitter? Linkedin? Gmail? I bet you didn’t read them, let alone remember them. Can you remember the rules for any platform or community you’ve joined…ever?

Don’t believe me? Track it yourself. Look up the number of hits to the rules page of your community. Is it low? Now use Google Analytics to identify the average amount of time each member spends on that page. 5 seconds? 10 seconds? Is that enough time to read them?

Creating and tweaking the rules might feel like an important community task, but it does nothing to change the behaviour of members. It’s your subtle influence that will have the most impact. 

Comments

[Christofian]

There is one thing that rules are good for, and that's if you have moderators for your forum (other than you). Than you want to make sure that all of the moderators know what is and isn't allowed, and what they should do if a member violates the rules. If they don't, then you will have one moderator banning a person for going off topic while another moderator ignores someone going off-topic. Members are going to complain if that happens.

[Sean R. Nicholson]

I completely agree with Christofian. The best reason for rules is for justification for correcting bad behavior. I ran a biker community for 5 years (motorcycles not bicycles) and you can imagine there there was a LOT of bad behavior ranging from simple brand bashing to overt racism. The terms of use and "rules of the road" allowed me to warn members when bad behavior occurred and take further action when necessary.

I encourage ALL of my clients to have a terms of use for their communities and periodically remind their users to read them.

My $.02...

--Sean
@socmedsean