> The next most naive suggestion is to stop downranking memes, dumb jokes, etc., often throw in with a comment like "doesn't anyone here have a sense of humor?"

> The next most naive suggestion is to stop downranking memes, dumb jokes, etc., often throw in with a comment like "doesn't anyone here have a sense of humor?". The fact that forums that don't aggressively moderate for picspam (so-called "memes") become dominated by picspam is exactly why any moderated forum needs to aggressively moderate such content if it wants to be a platform for intelligent discussion. On large social media where you're effectively doing the moderation yourself (think Twitter), that's why you have to mute or unfollow users who regularly post picspam. To make an online community usable, you have to moderate it to systematically exclude low IQ users or the entire community becomes low IQ and completely unusable. Stupid content gets enormous amounts of engagement. This wasn't as big of an issue in the past when the internet was less mainstream because stupid people weren't on it in significant numbers. A badly moderated community moderates for a particular set of opinions that the mods agree with rather than for IQ. That means it becomes filled with stupidity that people on that side agree with. Most moderated communities go that route because it's easier to filter for opinion rather than intelligence but it makes them worthless for any kind of serious discussion. Moderating for civility is one filter that works somewhat well because many stupid people resort to ad hominem attacks (think stupid nicknames for political opponents) as if they were arguments. But intelligent people are sometimes uncivil especially if they run out of patience arguing with an idiot. Things can also get heated between people who are friendly and intelligent if they have an irreconcilable disagreement on a topic both feel strongly about. Such debates often get wrongly confused for flame wars by mods so you do have to be careful about applying civility rules. Of course, any social media platform that wants a large mainstream audience is not going to follow this approach to moderation because you'd be systematically excluding at least the bottom 85% or so of the population to maintain a platform that's usable for high IQ people. If you assume 2 standard deviations above average as the minimum to be capable of intelligent thought, you're looking at excluding 98% or so of the population. In short, I disagree with the author's opinion that most people don't want a social media completely dominated by stupid "jokes" and picspam. I think that's exactly what most people want which is why platforms that value user growth and engagement over quality of discussion tend to converge on being dominated by stupid comments, pictures and videos. The next step after that is to remove or shadowban stuff the advertisers don't like which results in moderation based on viewpoint. Reddit is Reddit because that's what is most profitable for Reddit. The only way out of that vicious cycle is for a community to not rely on ad revenue and care about maximizing intelligent conversation not engagement.