I kinda personally agree that screenshots of someone making a joke isn’t a meme, that’s what !funny@lemmy.world and etc are for.

But I don’t think it deserves moderation. It’s not so egregious that it’s harming the community.

IMO, memes are internet folklore and should not be tightly regulated. Memes have a story to tell or a message to convey.

I don’t necessarily agree with screenshots of twitter posts being memes but many others do.

Allow memes in all their forms, whether there is 100% consensus or not. I believe tight regulation is what drove people away from other sites, such as Digg and later Reddit.

Well that’s my 2 cents. Thank you for reading.

Dan :)

This is a pointless discussion.
Most people don’t care, they want their doomscroll and will upvote anything. They don’t care about categories or definitions, we could have a single community with everything posted there and wouldn’t care, they’ll just consume.

Those who care will always be a minority so the things will never change when asked to the majority.

This is basically what happened multiple times in reddit, the mods didn’t think something was that important, the majority didn’t care, so someone took it in their hands to create an alternative sub that would actually fill that void.
That’s basically the only answer here, someone creating a meme comm that’s actually for memes and not a combination of !microblogmemes@lemmy.world !whitepeopletwitter@lemmy.world !greentext@sh.itjust.works but as we know it requires dedication and time so… not that easy.

I dont think rules are needed but in the about could be added a section for meme types and their communities so that posters may find better places for their funny like !microblogmemes@lemmy.world

There is a reasonable discussion to have about politics. (Not because they aren’t memes, but because it really annoys some people.)

For everything else, yes, people are overthinking it. How many people consistently come around here? Do we need to subdivide?

My take is a meme is a humorous repeated and shared idea/joke/schema/etc. Screenshots fall under this for me, espcially if the text is in reference to more conventional memes. This is because I count copypastas as memes, which makes it hard to differentiate a copypasta from social media screenshots and such. I would consider screenshots from social medias to be a low effort meme, but a meme nontheless.

My take is we should allow it, but soft moderate it by constructively and politely suggesting other communities that might fit the content better. This would ideally spread more awareness and engagement in other more niche communities, allow people to still post memes in good faith here, and provide a way for people to help softly moderate without ruining other people’s fun.

If this was practiced though, I feel there should be a rule that community suggestions should not be spammed in a post. This is to prevent the comments from devolving into brigading and spam.

I feel like the community has spoken through the votes. Everytime a post or comment about the content not being what they think a meme is supposed to be is posted, it gets ratio’d to hell.

If those types of posts were actually seen as bad for the majority of users, they wouldn’t be getting upvoted more than downvoted.

1. Yes. A meme is a meme.
2. No. Not all memes need to be funny or this would be !funny_memes
3. news might be a meme I guess. Certainly some headlines and articles have become memes themselves.
4. Non-text image… not really required, but it helps I guess.
5. yes, absolutely.

I guess it depends what the community purpose is: should it be a breeding ground for potential new memes where some might hit and others miss? Or are only variations on well-established memes to be allowed?

(My 2¢: the light-touch moderation method is the correct one. You’re doing fine, no change needed)

I think if anything the complaining about what is and isn’t a meme needs to be cut back. If someone wants only high quality OC memes and not just posts of whatever then subscribing to a generic meme community and being annoyed when you get a mix of meme types is silly.

I would just say with the news related posts, some kind of humorous edit should be happening. With unedited screenshots of twitter, the twitter OP is doing something funny, but unedited screenshots of the news are just the news.

I think it’s 5. for the most part. What could be done is forcing a mandatory tag like [TextOnly] or maybe the platform the screenshot is from [Reddit], [Twitter] etc. That way the people that don’t like those types of posts can just filter them out

We have !microblogmemes@lemmy.world specifically for that kind of thing.

I’m not bothered too much by it, but since we have a dedicated space for that sort of thing, it makes sense to post them there rather than here.

The explosion of this type of garbage is a big part of what killed Reddit imo. Or at least when the decline became noticeable.

We stopped seeing memes and the front page was just twitter screenshot after twitter screenshot and then the video garbage came along and it just spiralled.

I personally think it’s worth limiting this kind of thing to avoid the same fate. Though at the moment I don’t see it as a problem because lemmy users don’t seem to be going overboard with this stuff. There’s some restraint and judgment in place at the moment but who knows how long that’ll last.

Blanket banning social media screenshots would remove many posts which i would consider “valid” memes, so think that would be too much

#2 is highly subjective so that’s difficult to moderate

#3 i have seen headline posts that i would say qualify as memes so same goes for that as for social media screenshota

#4 same here, the alternative would be links, and i don’t want to have to open xitter to see a funny tweet

There needs to be humour, and ideally there’s something visual beyond text.

Categorisation is a good thing - it means you can find what you want and avoid what you don’t.

Are screenshots of other platforms like Reddit, X, Bluesky ‘off topic’? Or, do they count as memes?

I’m not a fan of them but they’re not something I would report as off-topic. But given the chance to voice an opinion on them, I’d say they’re more appropriate for the “people Twitter”-style social-media inception communities.

2. Does a meme require an attempt at humor?

I would say yes. I don’t subscribe here to be preached at. But there’d be some potentially awkward judgement calls for the purposes of enforcing that.

3. What about news? (What if a headline is funny?)

There’s !nottheonion@lemmy.world and similar for those and news/politics permeates everything. It’s nice to have a place away from that.

4. Is an image required? Should a picture of text (not from another platform) be removed?

That’s a tough one. I’ve seen pictures of book text being presented, but that often (but not always) bumps up against #2 (attempt at humor)