There has been discussion about whether we need a new rule to more narrowly define what a “meme” is, in response to screenshots of other platforms, pictures of text, etc. being posted. Some good arguments for yes and no were being made in this thread over the weekend, and this isn’t the first time people have brought it up, so I want to open the question up to the community.

My personal approach to moderating content is pretty “light touch”, because I don’t want to stifle people having fun (this is a meme page after all), and heavy-handed moderation reminds me of the worst parts of reddit. I think the role of a moderator is to clean up spam, keep the community on the intended topic, and intervene if people are being harassed, but for mostly everything else, that’s what the up/downvote system is here for. So, the question becomes “Are screenshots of other platforms like Reddit, X, Bluesky ‘off topic’? Or, do they count as memes?”

Here are some things to consider:

  1. Is a meme anything that gets repeated or shared? (this is the broad definition, but not necessarily the norm in how it’s used)

  2. Does a meme require an attempt at humor?

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

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

  5. Are we overthinking all of this?

Please let us know what you think. I’ll keep this post pinned for the week, and if there’s a general consensus, we can add a rule. Otherwise, we’ll just rely on the community upvoting or downvoting what it wants to see and making case-by-case judgment calls as we get reports.

  • CyberEgg@discuss.tchncs.de
    2·
    3 hours ago

    Yeah, I would say that a bit more moderation of content would be preferrable.

    First, I do think that pure text screenshots should not considered memes, that includes witty online conversations (though they can contain memes).
    Second, this is not exclusive to text. Just a few days ago, someone posted some picture of something in a car and the title (nothing on the picture, the poat title) was the question if anybody still knew what the depicted thing was.
    I don’t think that’s the kind of content that fits a meme community.

    Besides that, I do think image makros (picture with text) is a little too restrictive. Videos and GIFs can fit, too, if they show a meme. Even the a sound can be a meme.

    1. Is a meme anything that gets repeated or shared? (this is the broad definition, but not necessarily the norm in how it’s used)

    No, again, I don’t think so. And I don’t think we should go that direction. Because then, anything could be posted, including essays about how my poop looked like and how that’s a symbol of something. There’s a german subreddit called einfach_posten (meaning “just post”) where you could just post anything (except stuff like gore, nazi stuff, cp, suicide stuff and, ironically, memes). I don’t know whether there are english (or other languages) equivalents or if there’s something alike on Lemmy, but if we allow everything here because everything’s a meme, that’s the kind of content (plus memes?). If there is no such community on Lemmy, maybe someone should create one if there’s a nees for a space to post just anything.

    1. Does a meme require an attempt at humor?

    Not necessarily, but memes usually are humorous and satirical in nature.

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

    Even if memes did require humor, not everything funny is a meme. A news headline alone wouldn’t fit, but the headline and a funny depiction of it ( or maybe of an absurd interpretation) would suffice.

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

    Well, some kind of imagery (a video is a series of images) and pictures of text only should be removed IMHO (with exceptions, of course. There could be text that can be recontextualized into a meme, like an older text with a caption that shows how something holds up today, or an old tweet of a politician compared to his contemporary statements (like a photo of a decades old book with some lines about something that is supposedly a very recent developement or a screenshot of JD Vance calling Trump the next Hitler contextualized with his role as VP for Trump and maybe some snappy comment about some people just swimminh with the flow to grab power (though the latter example would probably get deleted for a violation of rule 2)).

    1. Are we overthinking all of this?

    Depends. Within the context of discussing how we want this community and what content we want to shared here, no, it’s a necessary discussion I think. And honest discussions are good.
    Within the context of how much impact this will have on life and society? Yeah, this would be overthinking.
    But I do hope that most people here understand which context we should discuss this in.

    Sidenote

    we’ll just rely on the community upvoting or downvoting

    That’s not a reliable method.
    First, some (like me) sort by new and see (almost) everything that gets posted here. Voting filters for users that sort by trending or top.
    Second, as someone else already stated, there’s a large body of users who don’t care so much, just consume, upvote, move on whatever they see. If they don’t like something, they mostly don’t vote at all.

    But this is just a sidenote and not necessarily to be considered in this discussion. Maybe this is even an example of overthinking.