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One of the most pivotal moments early on for any online platform or community is when an influential member or powerful person does something that, in your heart, you know is a violation of your guidelines. What you decide in that moment sets you down one of two paths.
On one shoulder, you have a demon. That demon says: "Wow! Look at your growth! This person has a lot of followers, and they can bring a lot of people to your community. If you tell them they can't do something, they'll get mad and tell people not to come! You'll never recover!"
On the other shoulder, you have an angel. The angel says: "Is the policy sound? Does it still have the same meaning it did when you wrote it? If they broke the policy, then why are you hesitating? Do you want future members to do the same thing over and over again?"
Of course, your better judgment is that, yes, the policy matters, and yes, you want people to follow it. But the demon is convincing because the demon uses fear. Your growth will stop. You will never recover. And your community will die. It's bleak, but it convinces many people.
And so you make the deal. You let the influential member violate the policy, and you don't say anything. Maybe your growth continues (maybe it would have anyway...), but your growth consists of people who are like the influential member, and they behave in the same way.
Eventually you encounter a problem. And now, it's a big problem. Many members are involved, and so is the media. And so you try to walk yourself back down the path you chose. You make announcements, you ban loud members who were violating it. You try to roll the clock back.
But that only very rarely works because now the community is different. It's more like the person you allowed to violate that policy years ago than it is similar to whatever model you had in mind at the start. They have moved on, and their reasons are different.
In those rare cases where it does work, it's usually not without pain and without tearing the community apart. Literally, people separate, choose sides, move to splinter communities, and you all start again, after a lot of emotion. You set a norm, and now you're destroying it.
I know it can be hard to take a long term view in a short term world, but if you truly care about building something that has principles and is good, you have to be tough. You have to listen to the angel. You have to tell the influential member they can't do that thing.
