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That's a fair counter-argument, and I appreciate you taking the time to write a thoughtful response! I do see how it might not be the best fit for Beehaw's stated philosophy. Taking it somewhere else on Lemmy seems like a reasonable alternative solution.

I must disagree on one point: gamingcirclejerk is one of the least toxic gaming communities on reddit, to me, especially ever since most of the others lost their shit over being asked not to buy the wizard game. There have been a lot of trans gamers taking refuge there since. And reports of r/gamingcirclejerk harassing the girlfriendreviews youtube channel/reddit account are greatly exaggerated and based, specifically, on a conveniently cropped screenshot of a comment chain about how girlfriendreviews reddit account sent one of the commenters a reddit cares message (aka, ostensibly a suicide prevention message, but commonly co-opted as a means of telling people to off themselves). The commenter reported their abuse of the reddit cares system, and girlfriendreviews' account was banned for it, like everyone who abuses that system.

That said, it's still not necessarily a pleasant place to spend time, since many of the posts are just taking screencaps of shitty comments, etc, and then making fun of them, but that means essentially you're now looking at a list of shitty opinions when you could be playing video games or something else much less upsetting. But, on occasion, it can be cathartic in moderation.

But regardless, in my disagreement I perhaps support the point of your comment here. Memes often aren't really meant for nuanced nor well-explained opinions, but more for playing to a specific audience. Hyping up, making fun, joking. We could post opposing memes about gaming subreddits and then have a fight about it and probably both end up feeling like we just wasted our time, I guess. I don't really want to spend my time on lemmy arguing overmuch about reddit drama.

But then, sometimes I see comics counted as memes, and sometimes those are actually quite good at succinctly making a point and inspiring discussion. There's quite a range within what might be considered a meme, with some being more thoughtful or discussion inspiring than others.

And stuff like "here is just an actual question, accompanied by an image" or me-irl style "here is a thing I relate to" memes seem pretty harmless in most cases. And I don't think every beehaw post or community needs to be Serious Discussions Only All The Time.

My tentative opinion is: the community is a baby right now. More posts and activity is usually good at this point, and if people don't care, they can ignore. If someone wants to make a meme thunderdome party thread about whatever, I think there's no harm in it unless it does end up going to shit, at which point action could be taken at that point. Maybe it wouldn't go to shit, so pre-emptive disallowing of it would seem a little draconian to me. But there's no need for it to be some official mod-post thing like some subreddits do, as yet. Nor for us to have a "memes friday" or whatever, like some subreddits do. People can just make the meme threads they want to see, imo.

But, perhaps the larger issue is where the heck to host the meme images. At least on the jerboa app, I cannot click on an image in a comment and see a full or zoomed in image. This maybe puts a dent in the meme plan until there's a good solution. Unless it just all goes on imgur or whatever in the meantime I guess.