Hello, Swift community.
The Core Team has decided to impose a new policy on the use of expressive images on these forums. Most importantly, this policy would forbid the use of “memes” and similar images.
The primary purpose of these forums is to foster open and productive technical discussion. One of our goals as a community is to maintain an overall friendly but professional tone of conversation, where all community members feel welcome to start new conversations and engage in debate. It is key to productive and open debate that arguments be made in ways that invite further discussion — a post should only be “hard to argue with” because it’s making a strong case, not because the form of the post makes responses more difficult.
Images and other visual aids can be an important way of supporting an argument. However, making an argument primarily through images is usually a poor replacement for making the argument in text. Visual arguments are by nature often unclear, ambiguous, or exaggerated, and they are difficult to respond to because the responder must generally do the work of first pinning down what the image is “saying” and trying to put it into words. Responding is especially difficult when the image is making a joke, as most memes do, because of social conventions around humor: it feels absurd to argue with a joke, it’s understood that the joke is likely an exaggeration of its maker’s true opinion, and analyzing the joke puts the responder in the position of having to appear humorless; and yet, the image is making a real point that people often feel obliged to respond to. Furthermore, the exaggeration and humor of an image can easily obscure that the intended message is not really respectful and would clearly violate the Code of Conduct if it were put into words. Such images may be meant in a lighthearted way, but they can be toxic in their actual impact.
Therefore, we have added the following rule to the official forums policy:
Discussion on the forums should be primarily textual. Expressive images such as "memes" — images that directly express a point through visual symbolism or a combination of symbolism and text — should generally not be used. Posting or linking to such images does not violate the Code of Conduct as long as the messages they express are allowed; the images should simply be removed with a reference to this policy.
This policy does not apply to images that simply support the surrounding text, including emoji, visualizations of data (such as charts and graphs), and literal portrayals of something being discussed (such as screenshots and mockups). It also does not apply to links to non-written speech (such as podcasts and talk recordings).
We acknowledge that this policy would forbid a form of humor that a lot of people appreciate, but we believe that to be acceptable in this case. We don’t want these forums to be an unpleasant place to spend time, but their primary purpose is to facilitate detailed technical conversation, and memes can really take away from that. In practice, memes are very rarely used here, so this shouldn’t be a significant culture shift.
John McCall
Moderator