Forums / Discussion / Serious Debate

Prefix: This ain't a mod-hate thread disguised as "concern". I think the mods and admins genuinely have acted in this site's best interests, and put up more news-oriented content in order to pay for servers for the stuff we like, via keeping traffic up. I know most threads like this go that angle, but personally I'm more just starting a discussion and to see if there's any real solution. Mods are cool, keep doin your stuff.

I've been thinking about this lately. I'm not a very old member, but I like to lurk the old stuff and see how the community is throughout. And I've noticed a lot of trends in doing that. Particularly, there's a LOT of deactivated accounts in old threads, and old users who are just a bit bitter on how the site is now. And while some of it is typical mod frustration, internet universal there, there's quite a bit about how the community or content isn't meme/internet-oriented anymore, or the community just isn't as welcoming or appealing. And I think I figured out why.

Back in early 2011, the site expanded its categories. And for the most part, this was a huge boon to the website, allowing a much more comprehensive documentation of the internet. Big internet users, communities, internet events, sites, etc all got their own nice pages. And most of those categories are still good. But the events category slowly morphed into documenting a lot of real-world events that didn't have a particular internet character, often with the only internet part being the image gallery and the tweets mentioned in the article. It's gotten even more common with how much politics is viral in the US lately, even though they only have corresponding memes 1/4th of the time. I fully understand why that happened though, as I mentioned above, and I don't blame the higher ups for it, but here's the problem:

With news websites, the primary reason people get an account isn't to leave their own ideas in the comments, it's to tell someone else in the comments that their opinion is wrong when it seems like no one else will. It's kinda like Cunningham's Law actually. And I've noticed that knowyourmeme has a higher percentage of that kinda account growth because of these more politics-oriented events pages. Hell, I'm pretty sure that's why I joined like a year ago. There's more and more users joining the site who only come here to debate politics wherever politics is discussed. Some are so bad that they get suspended by mods early on or even banned, others are acceptable but often act as the incendiary flame for flame wars around the site. While I don't think these people are bad people overall, I probably fit into that classification after all… I can't say it's very conducive to forming a community.

If that's where users primarily come from, you'll see more and more politics content on the site in a sort of feedback loop because a lot of the content here is posted by users. There's also a lot of older users who will now end up in more and more of these political debates, and might get so frustrated by the disagreements that they end up leaving for good. And as I mentioned, most people making accounts to talk about politics made it specifically because they disagree with what others said, so it will also make arguments more present. The overall friendliness of the site will take quite a hit.

And in fact, it has worse effects than a news comment section in some ways, because the user count is low enough, and the icons distinct enough, that people remember each other for the most part. While that's good stuff for forming a friendly community, when this community is constantly debating things it can lead to people forming grudges against people they think have shitty opinions. Consciously or unconsciously, I feel that's definitely a thing here.

That sorta effect is why I think there's a lot of people who've left saying the community has changed, and why there's so many people talking about how knowyourmeme is biased this or that way when really it shouldn't matter much at all since that's not the site's focus. Hell, I'd say it's probably why there seems to be a lot less community stuff appearing, though maybe that's just because there's less people. But what are your thoughts on the matter? Maybe this is just a dumb theory and I've just been convinced on weak evidence.

TL;DR: By making more news-oriented articles to appeal to the widest audiences, knowyourmeme has also increased the amount of people who come to debate politics and also the amount of regular users who end up involved in such debates, making the community more and more like a news comment section. New comment sections aren't known for being very friendly with each other in general

Yeah, at least for now in the forums people are getting along fairly well.

Here is another opinion: softcore porn played big role too. First image posts contained only memes and nothing more.

Now can't pass 6 hours without softcore porn posted. I agree with OP, people come here for politics, but ALSO for porn. Just look at trending tab. 50% or more are not memes, but porn.

So yeah, pretty much now people come here for porn and politics. But politics has memes at least, so I'm ok with it.

This site REALLY needs "masturbatorium" gallery, so weird people can clean their ramrods without polluting the rest of the site.

@NO!

I can see the Fun! and Media sections of the forums staying the same old places, you see a lot of older users there that don't comment on the rest of the site much. (occasional political parodies in riff-raff aside). But the discussion section seems to have changed based on my archive lurking. more political meme research, more political discussion in serious debate, and a lot more political news discussions in the general.

@Garumbo

I think the best way to handle that would be to make every image gallery have a tab called "inappropriate" where you click to view, which is where you're supposed to upload nsfw, maybe giving a little warning when you click it. I don't think knowyourmeme wants to make an overarching nsfw section because then they could be viewed negatively by new users for officially hosting a porn website within itself. ofc, that would double the image gallery count, so i dunno if it's feasible

@documents1

Also, to clarify some things I said, I think that the political content of this site has gone up naturally too, as there's a lot more internet-based political advocacy, internet-tied politicians, and politics that gets real memes. But I do think about half of the political and news content is from the events pages, and the recent politics made both political memes (which we have to document) and irl political events become more common here.

To be honest it was already like this 3 or 4 years ago (there was a fuckton of borderline stuff with MLP back then), and there have been "phases" where the gallery would be flooded with content of some kind depending on what was trendy at the time. For instance, when Kill La Kill was overwhelmingly popular, at the release of each new episode, you would always have the trending gallery half-filled with spoilers, then 3 quarters of Most Commented being about the last episode and theories about next episodes, etc. So having the gallery being monopolized by one type of content is nothing new.

That said, perhaps the NSFW stuff is more prominent nowadays because the meme tendencies (to say so) have changed. There is much more political stuff which is most of the time serious business (so, less chance to pop up as trending) or polarizing (a fair share of the political images you see nowadays on Most Commented are stuff posted by Hotsky☭, which triggers a lot of people here), so people are probably more reluctant to post it or make it trending. Then all what's left is that "masturbatorium", as you say, spare from one or two exceptions from time to time. And since regular memes are also less and less imaginative (think of all thing I don't like variants)…

@Annoying Belgian Guy

I do wonder why regular memes seem a bit stale lately. advice animals tend to be better than things i don't like memes, and that's pretty bad.

It is difficult for me to imagine any political meme doing anything but dividing a community. A meme, by definition is a a concise "picture" or "snapshot" of something and is meant to have maximum emotional impact (fear, anger, humor, or "pointed"). Thus, while there may be some debate in the comments, the whole thing is a exercise in scoring points, not a discussion.

Scoring points is not a form of persuasion but a way to "rally the troops" and gain some notoriety. Memes are never going to convince anyone of anything they haven't already concluded and expecting them to do so is being unrealistic.

Now the fact that their are more political memes only shows that the site has grown large enough to be a good place to score points. That is really all it is.

Personally I pretty much ignore all the memes exactly because I'm here for "serious debate" and that means debate which is measured, civil and honest. Most of what is written in the serious debate thread may not be as robust as I like, but it is pretty much civil, measured and mostly honest (LOL, nobody exaggerates?!).

AJ

@AJ

I actually don't mind the political memes, they're equally divisive I agree but they are part of our duty to document. At this point though, the site documents a lot of political news in general, which is what I'm more commenting on.