This article purports to be a defense of moderators against people who complain about rules not being specific enough, but I think it is equally valid to shove this argument in the face of a moderator who points at a rule and shows you the door for why their supposedly simple rule should never have carried such weight in the first place: no, it is not at all obvious that this thing you didn't like was a violation of your rule, as your rule was inherently vague and apparently encoded some hidden value system. It also, to me, strongly argues that computers and automation have little place in moderation and any such usage--in either direction--must be carefully and routinely scrutinized and evaluated by humans and preferably only used as tools by decision-makers (as opposed to first-line decision-makers in their own right).

The lesson that I think more people need to take from this is thereby to have more compassion for people who broke some supposedly-clear rule, by (at least) reconceptualizing the role of moderation by: 1) having multiple checks and balances on moderators, including both an easy way to appeal decisions to a preferably-higher and necessarily-separate power and a way for users to hold moderators accountable for their actions; 2) insisting that enforcement happen in public; 3) providing numerous examples of what has been allowed or not in the past (precedent is not to be confused with epicycles); 4) offering a way for users to ask, without judgement, whether a specific thing would be allowed before they take an action (transferring liability on the punishment off of the user, even if later on the action is deemed an offense); and 5) instead of focusing on listing simple "rules", spend your time documenting what your goals are along with your philosophy of enforcement.

Note: I actually am an elected government official for a local government--not the Recreation and Parks District, but I do work closely with them--and I am the chair of our policy committee, in addition to having spent a decade as a key moderator of a very large ecosystem of software developers, working on rules for both the software people could distribute/sell as well as doing live moderation of chat rooms. In so doing, I got to work with other people whose opinion on moderation I came to trust deeply, and spent an incredible amount of time just having discussions about how to deal with moderation in general as well as how to balance it inside of a system where I also insisted that I could not myself become a centralized dictator, which is how people always seem to want to approach the problems of content moderation, ignoring any chance to empower users in their own paths. I thereby want to be clear: I come at this as someone who isn't trying to blanket defend people who like to abuse either the system or other people... and yet I also don't think the way most people approach moderation actually solves that problem in a reasonable or principled way.

I thereby think it is worth trying to use this analogy a bit to show how current moderation systems seem to often work: you want to bring your toy car to the park, but see a sign "no vehicles in the park", and you want to be a good citizen so you call the office of the local park district to ask if this is OK; 99% of the time, you get an automated message to read the sign, and 1% of the time you get a person who says "I am sorry but if I told you whether or not that toy car is a vehicle, then bad actors will destroy our park". You then show up to the park with your toy car -- sure it couldn't possibly be a vehicle -- and a police officer shows up, throws you in jail for the day, and tells you you are banned from the park for life. You ask what you did--"OMG, was it the toy car? I am so sorry I didn't think it was a vehicle"--and the officer looks you dead in the eye and says they can't tell you what you did; or, if they do say it was the toy car, they refuse to engage in any form of discussion of why this toy car is somehow different from all of the other toys you see strewn around the park at that same moment.