I would be in favor of a group rule to prohibit meme macro posts. Even when I agree with them, I downvote them for degrading the quality of discourse.
Thankfully, I have seen very few in this group since I joined. I see much more good discussion and knowledgeable input. Still! Memes have overrun other good online spaces and driven their quality into the gutter, like some static image version of tiktok. That happened to a lot of reddit. That enshittifies them and drives away the very ppl who have the best insights and thoughts. Conversely, the online spaces that seem to hold their quality over time, cultivate a culture of quality discussion, banning or severely curtailing memes and ragebait.
In a place like this sure. Ironically though you don’t want to appeal to people who will have a discussion. Something like memes holds a thousands different meanings in the right context, and your brain picks up on that instantly.
The people who would never engage can get a distilled version of a 10 paragraph response from a meme, so when they do finally read a long opinionated article or comment, the memes they absorbed have already influenced them to a specific bias.
I believe we need more memes (NIMBY) on reddit, and to relentlessly make fun of our opposition to the point of it becoming a culture. The gamergate era Republicans are literally using the same exact arguments that they where trained to get triggered at 15 years ago. We need to be creating the equivalent of that.
I would be in favor of a group rule to prohibit meme macro posts. Even when I agree with them, I downvote them for degrading the quality of discourse.
Thankfully, I have seen very few in this group since I joined. I see much more good discussion and knowledgeable input. Still! Memes have overrun other good online spaces and driven their quality into the gutter, like some static image version of tiktok. That happened to a lot of reddit. That enshittifies them and drives away the very ppl who have the best insights and thoughts. Conversely, the online spaces that seem to hold their quality over time, cultivate a culture of quality discussion, banning or severely curtailing memes and ragebait.
In a place like this sure. Ironically though you don’t want to appeal to people who will have a discussion. Something like memes holds a thousands different meanings in the right context, and your brain picks up on that instantly.
The people who would never engage can get a distilled version of a 10 paragraph response from a meme, so when they do finally read a long opinionated article or comment, the memes they absorbed have already influenced them to a specific bias.
I believe we need more memes (NIMBY) on reddit, and to relentlessly make fun of our opposition to the point of it becoming a culture. The gamergate era Republicans are literally using the same exact arguments that they where trained to get triggered at 15 years ago. We need to be creating the equivalent of that.