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?

Nah its good being a catchall community where people can quickly dump anything they find funny. There aren’t enough posters for us to try and neatly categorise and contain every type of post.

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)

Shamelessly stolen from wikipedia: “Two fundamental characteristics of internet memes are creative reproduction and intertextuality.”

I’m other words, memes have to derive substantial meaning from its overall positioning in Internet culture.

As an example, this post derives most of its context and meaning from horror movies, outside of Internet culture.

This meme, however derives its visual elements from a tv show, but these have been recursively co-opted by Internet culture, and is further embellished with internet-centric experiences (steam friend activity).

In a more hypothetical approach, imagine a news headline with the subtitle “I FUCKING KNEW IT!” A headline like “rising home prices linked to decreased fertility” would not really be a meme, but one like “tube breach causes historically large Internet outage” would. Both posts are materially similar, and either could be a meme in differing circumstances of Internet culture, but context is everything.

1.) No, a meme is not anything that is shared or goes viral. Then anything would be a meme.

2.) Generally speaking, yes, but I wouldn’t necessarily make it a requirement for the community.

3.) If it’s just the headline, no.

4.) Yes, to me, a meme has always been an image + text. An image of text only is not a meme. Text only is not a meme. I would say images of other posts are okay, so long as something is added to it that makes it substantially more than the post itself (so, the post is a part of the meme, but the meme also involves something added by the memer).

5.) No, not yet. Healthy discussion is always good.

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.

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 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.

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.

We have [email protected] 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 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

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 [email protected] 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)

I think it’s a bit of #5, but like others have stated, we have other communities on the Threadiverse that meet the requirements of the other numbers, like [email protected] for silly news headlines and [email protected] for social media text post memes/funny posts. So I think we could gently encourage users to post to those communities instead.

The onky thing I’m not chill with is people just straight up posting the news/screenshots of serious political takes, but that’s an issue at !microblogmemes.world, not here imo. Outside of that were not too bad here.