My personal mod answer:
We rely on our judgment calls to decide whether something within the community is detrimental or incidental. Sure, it may be reactive and it may not be consistent from an outside perspective, but the calls are made and are variable and that is a good thing. To support and nurture a variable community that does not operate like robots adhering to a strict code, where many individual personalities may mesh or clash, it requires more of an attention to the tone of the community as a whole than the strict adherence to a strict expectation irrelevant of context.
It would be very easy to expect total adherence to such a thing, but it would not be very realistic. Not given the disparity of mods to members, and not given the variety and nature of relationships native to the environment.
Some might say the environment is not policed well enough, and that could be true, but how many are you willing to alienate by force in order for everyone to conform to an unrealistic ideal, given the nature of people?
I think good moderation is less about the ease of black and white, and more about the requirement for judgement calls in the context of the community as a whole, which black and white calls often tend to disregard for the sake of a fantasy of the Utopian internet community. I think it's harder to use judgement, but it's ultimately more beneficial when considering the people that make your site a success in the first place.
I'm not saying that it's required to sacrifice your own set standards as leadership. I'm saying that it's required to, as a mod, have to THINK about how you're enforcing those standards in the context of a living, breathing community.
It's easy to say "don't do X", but it's a lot harder to describe "X". And when you take the route of not thinking about what "X" really is, apart from a written law, then your membership won't be able to either, and you'll start losing their confidence to contribute in any way at all.
TL;DR: Proper judgement shouldn't be a defined system. It should be an application of wisdom.
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