[ANNOUNCEMENT] Our new meme policy.

If we as a community remember to upvote the stuff that positively contributes, we'll be fine.

Counterpoint: This has never, ever worked.

The Small Council agrees.

Sorry for hijacking top comment but are you serious?! The new series starts in 2 days, whats the point in introducing the policy in a week, it just means we are going to be spammed with memes for a week. Come on maesters, I approve the policy but you dropped the ball with timing.

Even though I sort of agree with the rule, I hate this moderator's ersatz of an excuse "please stop posting the stuff you like on our 16 000 readers sub and post it on this extremely ignored 400 readers sub".

Sometimes you just have to deal with it and let the community decide for every single submission... Yes! That's what upvotes and downvotes are for!

This is not your subreddit even if you created it, it's the community's, they generate the content and they decide what's worth the frontpage, you're just being a control freak and that's just outrageous.

not much of that going on in Westeros, unfortunately.

Agreed. It was a problem that kept rearing its ugly head and for a time I was content to rely on the downvotes to squash such posts. Sadly, it was becoming more and more clear that downvotes weren't enough.

Better to be proactive, I say. A stitch in time saves nine and all that.

I agree wholeheartedly. If a member of our community puts legitimate work into making a video, even if it's silly, I don't think they should be barred from posting it. I think it's important to differentiate between silly content with no real thought or effort and quality content that happens to be silly.

I like this! It allows for "silly" posts that aren't just mindless or quick easy memes.

Quick history lesson:

r/asoiaf was created before r/gameofthrones. When I first had the bright idea of checking to see if reddit had subreddits dedicated to Martin's books I saw that there were two of them. At the time, each had ~120 readers. I joined r/asoiaf as a subscriber because it was the much more active subreddit (it had, like, five new posts in the past month compared to r/got's one!). Later on I asked u/ThePowerOfGeek if he'd like another mod, he said what "Why not?", and here we are.

Now, when I began modding here the television show was getting a lot more attention (this was well before the premier, though). Because of that, I think, r/gameofthrones began to outdistance r/asoiaf in the number of subscribers. But TPOG and I would not relent. We customized this subreddit, began to advertise it (exchanging sidebar links, that sort of thing), and for the briefest of moments we seemed poised to overtake r/got.

Yes: there was a time when we were within 20 subscribers of outnumbering r/gameofthrones.

Then that bastard wonderful gentleman u/kjhatch came around and began modding for r/got. At this point, r/asoiaf had a unique look and feel (custom CSS and all that jazz) while r/got still had all the default graphics. KJ changed that and really started to promote r/got. Just then, boom! The show came out, too. Suddenly r/got exploded in popularity.

At first I was totally jealous and sort of pissed off. I mean, I'd put a lot of work into r/asoiaf and this crazy upstart comes along, swipes up the "brand name" subreddit, throws up a few graphics, and it is suddenly the go-to place on reddit for Game of Thrones?! Bullshit, I say! I wanted a rivalry with them. Hell, I wanted a duel to the death.

It turned out that KJ was good folk, though. Rather than hate each other we began to work together. Rather than be jealous of each other we began to challenge each other. The result, I think, has been best for both communities.

Sure, r/asoiaf may be the smaller subreddit. But that's turned out to be just fine. While I honestly enjoy r/got, I prefer r/asoiaf. I like the cordial debates and discussions, the interesting insights, the personal stories, all of that. r/got has great discussions, too, but what gets you a ton of upvotes there usually doesn't get you anywhere here. Their culture is different: not worse, just different.

r/asoif has always been more serious-minded. Oh, sure, the occasional meme or silly post sometimes made its way to the frontpage but it was usually a really good meme or silly-post. Otherwise it was downvoted straight to the seven hells.

Sadly, that has changed. We're over 15k subscribers now and, unfortunately, more and more people have learned that swiping a popular meme from r/got and reposting it here will garner a lot of upvotes. Or they just figure, "Oh, I know how to get some karma! Google 'Tyrion slapping Joffery' and post a link to a .gif of it here!". I mean, who can resist upvoting something like that? I'll be honest: I can't.

Over the last six months or so the idea that we should go to self-posts only to combat this swing towards "silly content" has come up many times. My comment history will reflect the fact that in the past I always argued against going to that extreme. I was 100% against any form of censorship excluding the enforcement of our spoiler policy or reddit's TOS. My reason for taking that stance was always simple: "This is a non-issue." Because it wasn't: 10-20% of the top posts every week qualified as "silly content" at the time. To me, that wasn't enough to warrant a major change in policy.

Recently it has become an issue. That 10-20% figure has been creeping up at an alarming rate. And, as I promised many people in the past, we maesters have decided to address the problem before it gets out of hand.

No one's saying you can't like memes. No one's saying you can't post memes. We're just saying you can't post them here. We mods work hard to make sure we understand the mood of the entire community before making a major change like this. We feel that we've done so, on this topic, and are prepared to move forward with the change. If it turns out we made a mistake, I shall personally accept responsibility for it and revoke the policy myself.

For now? Let's see how it goes.

Glen Cook series?

you can have censorship in a democracy.

Benevolent dictatorships are the best forms of democracy. Real-life wishful thinking and binge-sessions of Tropico have taught me as much.

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That'd be more suitable for r/gameofthrones, I'd think.

My favorite thing is enlightening people to plot threads or theories they may have missed on their first time reading through.

Like the Aeron-Euron sexual abuse thing or Lord Manderly's Frey pies. It so awesome seeing people's minds get blown. One of the best parts of the subreddit is how it gives so many people interesting new insights into the books.

The same with reality television, and yet here we are.