Stop people from enforcing the rules without questioning and understanding their purpose.

We have a lot of rules here, and that is a good thing most of the time. But the rules tend to take on a life of their own, independent of the purpose they used to serve. Most of our rules boil down to ensuring that people are civil and that the content meets a certain quality threshold. The specific rules are simply patterns we saw that indicated problems.

This can get to a point where people simply match patterns and act on anything that matches that pattern, no matter if the content actually presents a problem or not. This is in part due to some of our rules being inherently difficult to judge, but my impression is that in the end we always end up with more of a "letter of the law" enforcement than any true understanding of the purpose of our rules.

Half of this problem are popular, but inherently problematic rules like those against homework questions. They're very easy to overapply to posts that are not a quality problem. But you can misuse most of our other rules as well.

This is not about a single site, but about two that I feel attached to. How much of an issue this is probably depends quite heavily on the dynamics of the community and the topic, some topics are inherently more difficult to deal with.

Stop people from enforcing the rules without questioning and understanding their purpose.

We have a lot of rules here, and that is a good thing most of the time. But the rules tend to take on a life of their own, independent of the purpose they used to serve. Most of our rules boil down to ensuring that people are civil and that the content meets a certain quality threshold. The specific rules are simply patterns we saw that indicated problems.

This can get to a point where people simply match patterns and act on anything that matches that pattern, no matter if the content actually presents a problem or not. This is in part due to some of our rules being inherently difficult to judge, but my impression is that in the end we always end up with more of a "letter of the law" enforcement than any true understanding of the purpose of our rules.

Half of this problem are popular, but inherently problematic rules like those against homework questions. They're very easy to overapply to posts that are not a quality problem. But you can misuse most of our other rules as well.

This is not about a single site, but about two that I feel attached to. How much of an issue this is probably depends quite heavily on the dynamics of the community and the topic, some topics are inherently more difficult to deal with.