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.