Tell me about it lol just had an discussion with someone that unfortunately soured pretty quickly despite my best efforts but it is what it is.
I was getting at memes being limited in their expression of opinion, thus often lacking a lot of nuance.
Ah that makes sense, I missed that entirely.
I feel you on a lot of what you're saying, but ultimately we are dealing with people and people don't like to be wrong, so we have to be more gentle than we'd like sometimes in the service of "buy-in." For example: in another thread there was a discussion about libertarians. Now among friends, I'm the first to throw out (tongue-in-cheek-ily I might add) "Libertarians are Republicans who like drugs" and other little quips. Probably shouldn't, but meh, I'm not perfect and it feels harmless enough. Now if I'm actually talking to someone who is a libertarian, my rhetoric shifts. This came up because someone in the thread was being pressing about firefighting and how libertarians (allegedly) all want it privatized, a line they hear all the time. Whether the person is right or wrong about the libertarian's position is honestly pretty immaterial. The goal should be discussion and understanding the libertarian's position then addressing what they believe in an effort to convince them maybe their stance is problematic or straight up incorrect (assuming that is sort of an agreed to conversation across the board, otherwise it just feels like a lecture). But you open up telling people what they believe then attacking those positions, you're basically just backsliding into strawman arguments.
So how is that relevant here? We should not walk up to people before they've even had a chance to talk about what they think and say "all your ideas are dumb and ineffective" with a meme that created a discussion without nuance. Not if we are trying to do something more than get like-minded people to nod along and piss off those who feel to be the subject. If we want them to do the things we think are effective, which is an achievable goal because ultimately we all want more or less the same things (stop climate change, fix income inequality, etc), then we have to abandon those kinds of tactics. Does that make sense?