The Subtle Art of Not Setting Your Platform on Fire
Why do some governance shifts stabilize trust while others torch it?
Changing the rules in a community is one of those things leadership teams treat like rearranging furniture. Move a couch for better feng shui. Swap a lamp shade. Maybe announce it in a tidy blog post and maybe update the legal T+C.
Meanwhile, somewhere in the foundation, a very important and very load bearing support beam just started to snap.
Things are about to start getting… interesting.
Why? Well because governance, rules, guidelines, policies, process - whatever you want to call them or whatever “legislature” type you want to lean on - in mature communities are not for decoration.
Platform governance provides structural assumptions about how power flows, how safety feels, and how status is earned. They determine who gets heard, who gets downvoted into oblivion, who moderates for free, and who quietly leaves. By the time a rule feels “normal” it is already load-bearing.
And yet, every so often someone decides the beams are a little inconvenient. A little too restrictive for that open-concept kitchen.
For example, when Twitter shifted verification from a status signal tied to identity into a purchasable badge, that was framed as democratization. In practice, it detonated the platform’s signaling system. Visibility, credibility, and impersonation risk all got scrambled at once. It wasn’t a feature update. It was a power redistribution event disguised as a subscription model. And who knows, maybe that was intentional. The platform now known as X soon eliminated most other trust and safety elements further degrading any trust the majority of legitimate users with human emotions. It’s now a cess pool.
Similarly, when Reddit altered API access in ways that fundamentally changed how moderators and third-party developers operated, the narrative focused on business sustainability. The ecosystem, however, experienced something else entirely. Volunteer moderators who had built governance infrastructure for years suddenly realized the ground rules of their labor had shifted. That is not a minor tweak. That is rewriting the social contract while pretending it is a billing update.
Communities can survive unpopular decisions. They cannot survive incoherent ones.
I think a lot of times we equate trust in a community with an almost affectionate perspective. But it’s not that at all. It’s predictability. It’s the quiet agreement that if I behave within known norms, I can anticipate outcomes. I understand how visibility works. I understand how conflict resolves. I understand how effort translates into status or impact.
And the reality is that most of us aren’t looking at the rules because we’re worried about breaking them. We feel empowered by rules knowing that they protect us from an ecosystem and culture we don’t want to be involved in or sink time into.
When those mechanics change without clear alignment to actual user pain, people do not thoughtfully debate it. They adapt defensively. They reduce investment. They conserve energy. They start treating the platform as unstable terrain.
And unstable terrain does not attract long-term builders.
Now compare that with rule evolution that feels annoyingly reasonable. On Substack, most major changes have reinforced the same central promise: creators own their audience, control monetization, and operate with autonomy. You can argue with individual decisions. But the direction has been legible. The system’s underlying logic has remained intact. That coherence buys patience, loyalty from long time users, and willingness to try from new users (oh hello, that would be me).
In strong private communities, the same pattern shows up. A real problem is named. The change is explicitly tied to that problem. The consequences are acknowledged instead of minimized. Leadership does not pretend nothing structural is happening. They explain what is moving and why.
It is not flashy. It is not revolutionary.
It is boringly competent governance.
So, how do you avoid burning down the house?
Most catastrophic rule changes share a few predictable traits.
They optimize for metrics without understanding the fragile equilibrium those metrics reflect.
They redistribute power while insisting power is unchanged (although 99% of the time I’d argue leadership doesn’t even know who is being impacted)
They ignore second-order effects because modeling social cascades is inconvenient and spreadsheets are comforting.
Like we’ve talked about before, communities are ecosystems, not dashboards. Pull one incentive and ten behaviors shift. Change one visibility rule and an entire informal hierarchy reorganizes itself overnight. Pretending otherwise is not bold agile leadership. It is magical unicorn and rainbows thinking with a press release.
If you want to change rules without destabilizing trust, you have to treat them like infrastructure. Ask who built identity around them. Ask what invisible labor depends on them. Ask which status systems collapse if they disappear. Ask which new elites or predators emerge if you move them.
And then, crucially, say that part out loud.
Communities rarely implode because a rule changed. They implode because the meaning of participation changed without consent. When people realize the game they have been playing has new scoring mechanics, new referees, and a new prize structure, they aren’t going to be all “yay change!”. They reassess whether they want to play at all.
Rule changes that align with lived user problems feel like maintenance. Rule changes that ignore those problems feel like regime change.
One preserves trust. The other trends for a week and destabilizes culture for years.