Toddlers go through this sometimes around ages 2 or 3. They discover the "rules" for the first time and delight in brandishing them.
The fundamental problem is that communities/forums (in the general sense, e.g., market squares) don't scale, period. Because moderation and (transmission and error correction of) social mores don't scale.
Maybe initially, but in the community I’m talking about rules are introduced to prevent situations that might offend someone. For example, the rule warning against using the word “blind” was introduced by someone who thought it was a good thing to do in case a person with vision issues maybe got offended by it at some point in the future.
It’s a small group of people introducing the rules. Introducing a new rule brings a lot of celebration for the person’s thoughtfulness and earns a lot of praise and thanks for making the community safer. It’s turned into a meta-game in itself, much like how I feel when I navigate Stack Overflow
Sounds like that one is on its way out anyway...
Some of them are so overburdened that navigating all of the rules and expectations becomes a skill in itself. A single innocent misstep turns simple questions into lectures about how you’ve violated the rules.
One Slack I joined has created a Slackbot to enforce these rules. It became a game in itself for people to add new rules to the bot. Now it triggers on a large dictionary of problematic words such as “blind” (potentially offensive to people with vision impairments. Don’t bother discussing poker.). It gives a stern warning if anyone accidentally says “crazy” (offensive to those with mental health problems) or “you guys” (how dare you be so sexist).
They even created a rule that you have to make sure someone wants advice about a situation before offering it, because a group of people decided it was too presumptuous and potentially sexist (I don’t know how) for people to give advice when the other person may have only wanted to vent. This creates the weirdest situations where someone posts a question in channels named “Help and advice” and then lurkers wait to jump on anyone who offers advice if the question wasn’t explicitly phrased in a way that unequivocally requested advice.
It’s all so very tiresome to navigate. Some people appear to thrive in this environment where there are rules for everything. People who memorize and enforce all of the rules on others get to operate a tiny little power trip while opening an opportunity to lecture internet strangers all day.
It’s honestly refreshing to go from that to asking an LLM that you know isn’t going to turn your question into a lecture on social issues because you used a secretly problematic word or broke rule #73 on the ever growing list of community rules.