What are mores?
Mores are the essential customs and conventions of a community. Unlike laws, they are unwritten and unenforceable — yet they govern behavior more completely than any statute. They are the invisible architecture of social systems, the load-bearing walls that software engineers unknowingly encode into every platform, every algorithm, every interaction pattern.
mores.dev treats these patterns as what they are: data. Raw, structured, documented observations of how human beings negotiate the space between individual desire and collective expectation. This is not sociology. This is engineering reconnaissance.
Coded norms
- N-001 Turn-taking in conversation is culturally variable
- N-002 Personal space thresholds are context-dependent
- N-003 Eye contact duration signals dominance or submission
- N-004 Gift reciprocity follows unspoken accounting
The queue
In 2019, a ride-sharing platform deployed in Southeast Asia discovered that its first-come-first-served algorithm violated deeply held local mores about seniority and social hierarchy. Users abandoned the platform not because of price or convenience but because the queue felt morally wrong.
The engineering team had encoded a Western norm — strict temporal ordering — into a system serving a culture that prioritizes relational ordering.
Observable patterns
Every digital platform is a mores engine. Feed algorithms encode norms about what speech is acceptable. Recommendation systems encode assumptions about desire. Moderation policies encode judgments about transgression.
The question is not whether software encodes mores — it always does. The question is whether engineers are aware of the mores they encode, and whether those mores serve the community or merely reflect the assumptions of the builders.