How a Joke Becomes a Rule, in Four Steps I Watched Happen Nine Times

The most reliable process I observed in six years of moderation was the conversion of a joke into a rule. It happened at least nine times that I can document, always in the same four steps, and it is the main mechanism by which a community becomes impenetrable to newcomers.

Step one: something is funny once. Somebody posts a question in a slightly odd way and a reply makes a joke of it. Nothing has happened yet.

Step two: the joke becomes a response. The next time anyone posts something similar, three people make the same joke. It is still affectionate at this stage and everyone involved would describe it as friendly.

Step three: the joke becomes an expectation. Now people who are about to post the thing anticipate the joke and either preempt it — “I know, I know” — or do not post at all. This is the crucial step and it is invisible, because what changes is the things that stop being said, and nobody notices an absence.

Step four: the joke becomes enforcement. A newcomer does the thing, not knowing, and the replies are the joke, and because they do not have the history it does not read as affectionate. It reads as being laughed at, which is what it now functionally is. They leave or they adapt. At this point the community has a rule that appears nowhere in the rules, that nobody decided, and that no individual is responsible for.

I saw this produce norms I approved of and norms I did not, and the process was identical in both cases, which is what convinced me it is structural rather than moral. One of the nine produced a genuinely useful convention about how to ask for help. Another produced a situation where nobody would admit to using a particular piece of software, which was absurd and which took a year to undo.

Undoing it, for the record, required the moderators to break the joke deliberately — to answer such posts straightforwardly and quickly, several times, before anyone else could reply. It worked, slowly. Asking people to stop did not work at all, because everyone involved correctly pointed out that they were only joking.

The thing I would say to anyone who runs a community of any size: the health check is not whether the rules are good. It is whether a newcomer can make an ordinary mistake without being made into a joke. That is checkable — go and look at the last ten first posts by new accounts and read the replies as a stranger would.

And to anyone who has felt inexplicably unwelcome in a place with friendly rules and pleasant people: this is probably what happened. There is a body of jokes you were not there for, and it is functioning as a set of expectations, and the people enforcing it are not aware they are doing anything.