Facebook's rules are necessary because of the nature of the beast: When a company is large enough to have to begin to hire outsiders to moderate content, the "m

Facebook's rules are necessary because of the nature of the beast: When a company is large enough to have to begin to hire outsiders to moderate content, the "moderation culture" (for want of a better term) is lost. In order to communicate this, you need to codify it in a set of rules that outlay exactly what actions take place when. The problem I see with this method is that you lose the ability to have a "why". Why content is left in place despite not meeting the rules, or why content is removed despite meeting them. Community insiders promoted to moderate have usually demonstrated that their opinions are in line with the culture that the moderators are attempting to promote, which means the sort of rules that lay out exactly what is acceptable versus what is unacceptable are not required. There's definitely upsides to the moderator-community-gestalt method of determining what content is unacceptable, the biggest of which is that it denies trolls the ability to 'rules lawyer' their way into posting content which is against the spirit of the rules, but not against the letter. Which system is more elegant? I don't think Facebook's is, necessarily, but even if it were I don't think it should (or needs to) apply to a community like HN.