I am always fascinated by the made up rules of group managers and moderators. Which rules enables successful communities? Which rules make members go away? There is so much to learn from them.

Clear rules and well-known power structructures help members self-select into communities they like. Each community is on itself is a product that somebody is carefully managing. Tools to help mods manage all conversations are essential to the existence of the community.

For instance, one reddit community I participate just added a **no volume posting**: "Please limit your posts to no more than 3 per day. If you make a series of posts in a short period of time, you may have some of them removed. Feel free to re-post the removed posts another day in the future."

Another community just completely banned off-topic posts: "We are not here to make friends and discuss each other business, we are here to learn how to cook and discuss our kitchen experiments with the broader internet. Every other post will be deleted"

That's beautiful. It sets the pace for what the mod hopes is an acceptable human interaction with technology. It makes people focus in posting just the things that matter the most. And the technology must be there to help them enforce those rules.