In light of the recent modification to the "rules" around here, I had to break down this argument. So here goes.

The mod argument A from the "new rule" post:

"It's not that we don't like images, it's just that it's usually the easist and laziest way to get a point across.

But, as has been said in other comments, why wouldn't I take the easy way to explain something if a picture does it better? As has also been stated, a picture says a thousand words. Right, so we can post it in the self-post's text below. But there's the catch. That means this is only a subpoint to the main bullet, just one little detail of the deeper intent described full-on in mod point B:

"There's also been some blatant karma whoring. We really want this subreddit to be a place you visit and are greeted with great discussion and knowledge and understanding of the game, not just a series of screenshots."

Could someone explain to me what "Karma Whoring" is and why it's a bad thing? Who really goes around believing that other redditors are better redditors because their karma score is higher or worse because it's lower? We at reddit judge on the submission and on the quality of posts and show this judgment through upvoting. We can also deny availability through downvoting. If someone posts a nice picture of a bunny being cuddled by a cat, I'll upvote it whether or not they have -700 karma because all the other pictures they've posted are of horse mutilation. Their history does not describe their individual posts, and their karma dictates nothing about their value on reddit except to say how many people found other individual posts valuable.

God forbid someone posts something that makes me laugh and I upvote it and it just HAPPENS to be a reference to "The Most Interesting Man". Does that make me a worse person for laughing? Does it make OP a worse person for posting it? If I upvote OP and he downvotes me for laughing, does that mean the guy who's better than me is making me more less than himself? It's a number. It fluctuates based on entertainment value. Get over it.

Value is subjective. What if I love meme posts but for some reason HATE posts complaining about the death of Lydia? Do I appeal to the mods to put a moratorium on the death of the companions? No. I simply downvote or hide the post and MOVE ON. If I want to have a longform discussion of a minor lorepoint in skyrim, I can do that here in r/skyrim, as that's what the tags are for. Use them and I could just navigate only the posts with the [Lore] tag to find my way to other nerds who obsess about details in the books in-game (I did this just last night, in fact, and was obstructed by no complaints about companion AI).

Every subreddit is a subsociety of the greater reddit. r/Skyrim has ~42,000 people who call it their own. But that's the detail the mods seem to be overlooking. They call it their own. It is a group of the people, not a place provided for by the moderators. Without the people, the subreddit wouldn't exist. Can't say the same about the mods non-existence. But without them and posts about seemingly necessary rules, I wouldn't be spending my time writing this right now. Fortunately, I love a good revolution, no matter how small, so I write this happily, knowing someone might read it and take hold themselves.

So, mods, when you try and control people's enjoyment of their free time on a free service, you will end up over-doing the guidance of the group and you will have a revolt on your hands when people tell you something's wrong with your "leadership" strategy. We're a subreddit. Not a team. We don't need leaders. We don't need guidance. We need our upvotes, our downvotes, our shitposts, and the societally valued too-muchness of our graphs. It's not about who's in charge. It's about the fact that nobody should be in charge 'cause it's not a government and you mods aren't doing anything for me as a subscriber in the first place.

In conclusion, I answer the mod response about why we don't create and join a r/skyrimimages if we want our image links so badly with this: Why didn't you leave and create an r/skyrimlongformdiscussioncirclejerk subreddit away from people who just want to have fun here.

EDIT: Readability.

EDIT 2: In order to be productive, lemme suggest that all discussion posts should have their own tag: Discussion. Make it so that people who want to discuss a certain topic have the opportunity to do so by searching the subreddit (as with Lore, Spoiler, and Question) for "Discussion".

As discussed in this similar post, it's not just about karma whoring, it's about avoiding sensational mini-crap filling the front page because most upvotes actually come from knee-jerk reactions about content. Okay. So should we just ban voting at all on the subreddit because obviously redditors don't know what they're doing and we need mods to intervene and tell us what should and shouldn't make it to the front page? No. That really doesn't make sense nor does it make any use of reddit's capabilities. To have such a thing of such controlled content is just having a blog. If you want control, go take control from the start and start a tumblr. But this is reddit. And this sort of upvote-based social promotion is what it's built for anyway.

EDIT 3: As I responded to in a post below, based on the idea that up and down votes don't police themselves, reddit is a community. The front page is dedicated to those links which the community feels are most-valuable to itself. So if the link is on the front page, it's not just "those moronic members of the subreddit" putting it there. That means you're either not doing a good enough job of downvoting or you, as someone who feels they value "quality" more than "those types of redditors", aren't actually in the majority at all. Up and down votes are, in fact, effective for a smaller group of individuals when they all have a similar idea of what should and should not make it to the front page. But, as we know from politics (and I'm not referring to the subreddit), the truth of the matter is that the majority is generally stupid and wants things that are not good for it.

You can't tell 42k users that they suddenly have to listen to rules they haven't paid any attention to and probably won't pay any attention to anyway. That's the way people work. But if you were to start a new subreddit with those rules in place from the get-go, then you could, theoretically, handle this far better than the current attempt to "salvage" r/skyrim or whatever it is the mods want to do. Start off with the idea that content will be carefully moderated to ensure quality and you'll end with a small community focused on that quality rather than just being focused on skyrim, as the name of the subreddit suggests.