In the beginning, it was just me. When I joined Lemmy what I really missed about reddit was the ‘curated twitter’ subs where every post was just a nice little thought someone had had. There were meme communities already but nothing quite right, it was mostly deep-fried shitposting. I think this was even before the new WhitePeopleTwitter started on sh.itjust.works but I’m not sure.
I didn’t want to start a new WhitePeopleTwitter, for three reasons - it wasn’t my sub on reddit so it didn’t feel appropriate to stage a “take over” of that name here; I didn’t want to specify “white people” in the title, and I also didn’t want to reference “twitter” because microblogging is bigger than twitter now and I didn’t want to contribute at all (even if a little bit) to the idea that twitter is the default option for microblogging.
So MicroblogMemes was born! In the early days it was just me posting a bunch of screenshots every day and we didn’t need any rules. I didn’t want to act like this was some big formal endevour and add a ton of detailed rules for everyone to follow, and since then I’ve only added rules when I’ve had to moderate something and someone complained.
The reason I’m making this post is because we have a new rule - no advertising. I personally am not interested in seeing posts from brands pretending to be people. The likes of Wendy’s, KFC, Microsoft, etc have advertising budgets that run collectively into the billions and I just don’t want adverts disguised as content here.
Yesterday someone posted this:
To me this is pretty much just advertising. A member of the community reported it, and I removed the post with the comment ‘hail corporate’.
For fully transparency this exchange then occured (read from the bottom):
I’ve basically explained my reasoning for this approach already but, in short, I have tiny, tiny amount of power on the internet to create a space with fewer adverts and that’s what I’m going to do. Be the change and all that.
I often think about this quote from Banksy:
Not really sure why I felt the need to post all this but there you go. If anyone disagrees with any of this please let me know in the comments and we can work it out :)
To be fair to him, he didn’t get the benefit of the explanation that we have received here. It’s pretty frustrating to have a highly upvoted post in a community removed when it doesn’t break any rules. As he explains, power-tripping mods are the biggest reason he left reddit, and he naturally assumed it was more of the same.
I think this post does a great deal to clarify the rules and motivations behind them, and also demonstrates that the community seems to be supportive of such rules. Most Lemmings surely agree that corporations and advertising are extremely unwelcome on this platform. I think there was just a misunderstanding on why the post had been removed that was hopefully cleared up with this additional context.
I get being frustrated, but this site is very obviously new, young, and actively trying to figure out its own established rules and expectations.
Having one single post removed because the mod realized they needed to clarify more about the content is not that big of a deal. This place is small and loosely established. The rules are not fully figured out yet.
Big overreaction to ragequit and leave salty messages on all your former posts
And one of the facts of a system with fewer rules is that there’s gonna be a leader using judgment calls instead.