Rules doesn't matter : Censorship vs. Security regulations

You are free what you want to do, this is where creativity takes place, but however, It will cause you a danger, a wise philosopher once said -too much of a good thing is a bad thing. Hence, this is where restriction and censorship takes place. Censorship is the suppression of speech, public communication, or other information, on the basis that such material is considered objectionable, harmful, sensitive, or "inconvenient." On the other hand, restriction is the limitation or control of someone or something, or the state of being limited or restricted. The key difference here is suppressed and limits.

Censorship is more powerful than restriction, yet censorship and restriction is just a part of security regulation. Regulating means controlling a certain activity, to control things you have two certain tools, to censor and restrict. If a particular activity, for instance pornography, how security regulation controls this type of sensitive thing? Do It needs censorship? or just restriction? If we censored this, It means we removed this whole thing forcibly, else, just put a set of rules, restricting only the genitals, like how japanese porn industry do. Either way, putting this measurements will limits creativity, violates freedom of expressions, we do not need regulations at all, we just need to make sure If everyone is happy about what things has to offer.

Rules are just dictating what we have to do, from what to watch, hear, smell, taste and touch. It is controlling our lives, we need to be free from this. When you go to school, do you read the rules of the establishment before you enter? What about a hospital? Restaurant? Sports stadium? In fact, when was the last time you read the rules for anything, ever? Can you even imagine a line of people reading the rules before they enter an establishment? It would take forever to get inside.

Yet, even without these rules, we usually manage 'not' to steal everything and trash the place.

I’m amazed that there is so much discussion about what to include in the rules of a community platform. We’re not on the same planet as our members when we think like this. New members don’t read the rules. No one does. It may be comforting (and legally useful) to have them, but lets not pretend they do anything to change behaviour.

What are the rules for using Facebook? Twitter? Linkedin? Gmail? I bet you didn’t read them, let alone remember them. Can you remember the rules for any platform or community you’ve joined…ever?

Don’t believe me? Track it yourself. Look up the number of hits to the rules page of your community. Is it low? Now use Google Analytics to identify the average amount of time each member spends on that page. 5 seconds? 10 seconds? Is that enough time to read them?

Creating and tweaking the rules might feel like an important community task, but it does nothing to change the behaviour of members. It’s your subtle influence that will have the most impact.