Photography

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.

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.

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.