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.

2. Does a meme require an attempt at humor?

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

3. 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.

4. 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)).

5. 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.

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 :)

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

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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)

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.

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

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.