"So posting rules is just a way to insult the majority of the law-abiding citizens and it doesn't deter the morons who think their own poo smells delicious and nothing they post could possibly be against the rules."
I run a travel blog hosting site as a hobby, and that quote has always rung true for me (I built the social aspects of the site largely from that article and the Clay Shirkey one linked elsewhere in this thread.) I delete maybe a dozen blog entries by hand each day, most of which are obvious spam, but some of which are certainly borderline cases that could possibly just be somebody not knowing better. Regardless, in 4 years of running the site, I've never received a single complaint from a user about a deleted post.
People know when they're behaving badly, regardless of whether there are rules in place to tell them so.
I run a travel blog hosting site as a hobby, and that quote has always rung true for me (I built the social aspects of the site largely from that article and the Clay Shirkey one linked elsewhere in this thread.) I delete maybe a dozen blog entries by hand each day, most of which are obvious spam, but some of which are certainly borderline cases that could possibly just be somebody not knowing better. Regardless, in 4 years of running the site, I've never received a single complaint from a user about a deleted post.
People know when they're behaving badly, regardless of whether there are rules in place to tell them so.