I’ve found it’s hard to get any Discord community together where chat messages are less than 60% reposted meme images. Someone will post an interesting thought, and then the next post is a single emote or a cat-related meme with a single word like “Udge”.
The good thing is that you can choose to ignore the meme, reply to the interesting thought and continue the conversation. Then if you keep the conversation going, it could be made a thread if people are interested in it.
Also a honeypot for memes is helpful so people are less inclined to drop them in general channels
Meme images use more vertical scroll space than text. If just a few people repost the same “neutral expression cat” image every so often, it pushes away genuine questions very frequently.
People tend to ignore dedicated-channel rules as well.
So just scroll up? It's not like when a message is off the screen, it's gone forever. Or do you never catch up on messages that you missed while offline and just go in from there?
Provided the community has clear rules on where to post gifs/memes redirecting the user is fine. Of course it should be a gentle reminder and not feel as if the user is getting berated.
If they still get pissy after that, it's more on the user. A reminder to follow the rules is not a personal attack.
I think that's been part of my issue - there's a wealth of bad, or even just "ambivalent" actors, and not enough moderation in a lot of channels.
Plus, while stopping someone from hate speech feels like a clear action for moderation, berating them for things like posting memes in "general" can feel totalitarian. A lot of communities don't commit to that kind of strictness.