I know this community has seen a lot of meta posts lately and the last thing I want to do is pile on or draw the eye of Sauron our new mod team, but Dohpaz mentioned the community banding together to include a common identifier in post titles (context) and I think the idea has enough merit to surface as a top level discussion.

I’m not looking to make rule 5 so cumbersome that the ordinary person needs a doctorate in regular expressions to figure out how to name their post (or create a bunch of extra work for the mods), but I do think there’d be genuine benefit in encouraging folks to put the comic titles or creators in their post title.

First and foremost, this makes attribution a priority and while I recognize that there’s always going to be someone just starting out or the odd comic who’s author has been lost or the Internet, I believe in an era of questionable information, the best thing we can do is cite our sources.

From the perspective of accessibility, it guarantees that anyone who can’t see the post thumbnail (be it due to vision or just one of myriad of different front ends, clients, and formats that one might use to access Lemmy) can have the same heads up about what a post might contain as someone who can see stick figures and assume that it’s probably XKCD.

Similarly, front loading attribution helps address the “what do we do about problematic artists?” discussion. I will admit that it is a compromise, but in a world of imperfect people and imperfect solutions, it strikes me as the sort of compromise where everyone can walk away from the table feeling like they got some of what they wanted. To those that value freedom of information and expression, comics are still available and nobody is claiming a moral high ground on what can and can’t be posted. To those that would rather not see/ engage with content from problematic authors, comics are clearly labeled and can be more easily be ignored, down voted, or filtered out (if your client supports it). I’m not sure if Lemmy has a limit on pinned posts, but maybe the mods could pin an artist review mega thread where we could keep a community discussion of “in case you’re one of today’s unlucky 10000, this artist frequently posts hateful comments”.

Finally, for purely practical (and admittedly somewhat selfish) reasons, it would make it much easier to search for posts if one sought to find a specific comic or discussion in the community history. (Plus I think it might be neat to open the door from some dataisbeautiful visualizations on the popularity of the comics that get posted here).