The 10 rules of Twitter (and how I break every one)
If you follow the talk over on Twitter you'll see that there are some unwritten "rules" and that I am breaking lots of those rules and pissing lots of people off. — I break the rules so you don't have to. — So, what are they?
Context & Ripple Effects
By late September 2007, Twitter had spent the summer pushing past its early-adopter base: an integration with the MTV Video Music Awards aimed at mainstream viewers, new Profile Search for finding people to follow, email address-book import, and phone-in tweets via Dave Winer's TwitterGram. Growth was outpacing any shared sense of how the service was supposed to be used.
Into that gap steps Robert Scoble, who says he is deliberately breaking the community's unwritten rules and angering other users in the process — then publishes the list itself. With no official rulebook to appeal to, enforcement of Twitter etiquette at this point is entirely peer-to-peer, which is exactly why one prominent user's transgressions become a public argument rather than a moderation case.
First-order effects
- Fellow Twitter users police Scoble's rule-breaking directly, confirming that in 2007 the platform's only working governance mechanism is social pressure among members.
- Publishing the ten rules converts scattered gripes into an explicit debate over what the norms actually are — and hands newer users a visible map of conventions they never agreed to.
Second-order effects
- As Twitter courts mainstream audiences through moves like the MTV partnership and lowers the barrier to following people via Profile Search, collisions between early-adopter etiquette and newcomer behavior multiply, forcing the company to choose between leaving norms informal and writing them down.
- Rival services watching the fight — Pownce among them, already criticized by commentators for a weaker API — see that usability norms, not just features, shape which network users settle into.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, unwritten etiquette on fast-growing consumer platforms tends to harden into official policy once the user base diversifies enough that peer enforcement breaks down; the open question for Twitter is whether it codifies the rules itself or leaves the job to convention and third-party tooling.
The trend: As microblogging scales from early adopters to mainstream audiences, socially enforced etiquette becomes the raw material from which platforms eventually write formal rules.