I joined Reddit because of the thoughtful discussions, and because it was well moderated, site:reddit.com became an extremely useful search term to find answers to difficult questions. I didn’t have much appetite for meme communities and ironic shitposting. It is frustrating to try and discuss the nuance of an article with a pool of people who comment with their knee-jerk reactions to the article title but aren’t interested in the actual content.
My thinking has since shifted since I started studying patterns for good community-building as a Fediverse admin. It can take significant parts of an hour to engage with long-form content like an investigative report or video essay, and that severely limits who can participate constructively in the comments section. Meanwhile a meme takes seconds to digest, which is more typical of available leisure time. A post on !documentaries or !infrapolitics is lucky to get a dozen votes and any engagement, while it is unusual for !memes posts to get fewer than 100 votes.
I’m still garbage at finding good memes or making my own, but I’ve come to respect that while a lot of the discussion they provoke isn’t particularly constructive, the sheer volume of the response and the mechanisms of moderation and vote filtering mean some surprisingly insightful discussions can arise in ‘low-effort’ post comments. And people who engage with meme content often experience it as a gateway to more serious communities on the server.
While the traffic to a meme community can spill over to your other discussions and draw additional attention to your server, I don’t suggest creating one if you no longer have the appetite for that kind of content. Meme communities require at least as much moderation as more serious communities, and are more likely to attract trolls and bad actors. But If you can find people interested in creating and maintaining them based on your server’s ground rules, I don’t think it’s a bad idea to include those kinds of communities on your server.
Oh yeah; I see the benefits of meme communities, but it takes a lot of work running a vegan one. During that time, I was exposed to a lot of material that I don’t wish to be any more including some really insane things like people hurting small animals on video and sending it to me. Big picture for me and vegantheoryclub.org is that I’m in my 40s and I’m looking for similar people in a similar place to bullshit with and post cooking and mutual aid online. I’m not really trawling for vegan converts. While obviously conversion and convincing are important as vegans since we are a huge minority with a moral philosophy the biggest challenge as I see it is recidivism. People fail at veganism because once they make the jump, they have nowhere else to go or to talk to, so I hope this small lemmy server for the population it ends up attracting can help them with that. I don’t see it as a tool for drawing engagement or mass numbers like the lemmy.vg person wants to do, and I definitely am done dealing with these fucking assholes who troll vegan forums who after removing their posts taunt you for weeks because they are miserable losers with no one to talk to and no social skills. To be honest I hate them.
I don’t think using a bot to copy memes is a valuable service at all. It becomes completely divorced from its context.
I joined Reddit because of the thoughtful discussions, and because it was well moderated, site:reddit.com became an extremely useful search term to find answers to difficult questions. I didn’t have much appetite for meme communities and ironic shitposting. It is frustrating to try and discuss the nuance of an article with a pool of people who comment with their knee-jerk reactions to the article title but aren’t interested in the actual content.
My thinking has since shifted since I started studying patterns for good community-building as a Fediverse admin. It can take significant parts of an hour to engage with long-form content like an investigative report or video essay, and that severely limits who can participate constructively in the comments section. Meanwhile a meme takes seconds to digest, which is more typical of available leisure time. A post on !documentaries or !infrapolitics is lucky to get a dozen votes and any engagement, while it is unusual for !memes posts to get fewer than 100 votes.
I’m still garbage at finding good memes or making my own, but I’ve come to respect that while a lot of the discussion they provoke isn’t particularly constructive, the sheer volume of the response and the mechanisms of moderation and vote filtering mean some surprisingly insightful discussions can arise in ‘low-effort’ post comments. And people who engage with meme content often experience it as a gateway to more serious communities on the server.
While the traffic to a meme community can spill over to your other discussions and draw additional attention to your server, I don’t suggest creating one if you no longer have the appetite for that kind of content. Meme communities require at least as much moderation as more serious communities, and are more likely to attract trolls and bad actors. But If you can find people interested in creating and maintaining them based on your server’s ground rules, I don’t think it’s a bad idea to include those kinds of communities on your server.
Oh yeah; I see the benefits of meme communities, but it takes a lot of work running a vegan one. During that time, I was exposed to a lot of material that I don’t wish to be any more including some really insane things like people hurting small animals on video and sending it to me. Big picture for me and vegantheoryclub.org is that I’m in my 40s and I’m looking for similar people in a similar place to bullshit with and post cooking and mutual aid online. I’m not really trawling for vegan converts. While obviously conversion and convincing are important as vegans since we are a huge minority with a moral philosophy the biggest challenge as I see it is recidivism. People fail at veganism because once they make the jump, they have nowhere else to go or to talk to, so I hope this small lemmy server for the population it ends up attracting can help them with that. I don’t see it as a tool for drawing engagement or mass numbers like the lemmy.vg person wants to do, and I definitely am done dealing with these fucking assholes who troll vegan forums who after removing their posts taunt you for weeks because they are miserable losers with no one to talk to and no social skills. To be honest I hate them.
I don’t think using a bot to copy memes is a valuable service at all. It becomes completely divorced from its context.