So I guess I’m wondering if this community is intended to be about photography, as in the discussion of photography, or if it’s going to be like r/itookapicture was on Reddit. I absolutely don’t think that we need to replicate what they did on that other site, but those were two very different places with very different purposes. They’re both valuable, but I think that they’re valuable in different ways and it might be good to separate them from each other in some fashion.
I guess it should be for photography more serious than “i took a picture” but I’m not gatekeeping content right now, let’s just share images and build a community. Posts about photography, including photography blogs are welcome as long as you don’t spam. I’m open to community suggestions.
I think it’d be good to put a few guidelines in place to shape the discussion away from the lowest common denominator. Even the very basics of asking posters to describe why they liked the photograph enough to post it is a nice, gentle nudge in the direction you’re describing.
I think a lot of communities start out as a single group for a wide range of content related to a topic like photography, including gear talk, photos, industry news, howtos, etc… When they get to a certain size, discussions start getting lost in the flood of content and it makes sense to fork more specialized sub-communities.
Forking too early leads to a bunch of dead communities with a handful of posts.
That makes sense, but it just feels like splitting off talking about photography from posting images just to share your work – which is great, don’t get me wrong – seems more useful? That’s my 2 cents.
I think that’s a wise approach, it’s too early with people adopting new platforms. I do like @Melon 's idea of suggesting photo-only posts come with some context, or insight into the post. Especially if folks happen to be sharing other work that isn’t their own, but that’s another topic altogether. I doubt we’ll hit spam levels of posts soon, but it would at least guide the community in some regard.
I think that suggestion is fair, let’s allow the community to grow, and as it does we will see what rules are required