As a community grows in popularity, it often shifts from hosting insightful discussions to attracting memes, funny, and low-quality content. This change appeals to a larger audience interested in such content, creating a vicious cycle where valuable discussions are overshadowed and marginalized by the platform’s primary demographic.
It’s the pendulum swing of pretty much every community on Reddit.
- Community starts out with a small group of users dedicated to quality content related to the topic
- Community growth reaches a point where the most popular posts begin to trend outside of the community
- New users join the community after seeing popular posts show up in their own feeds. Growth accelerates
- Community becomes “popular” enough that posts regularly trend outside of the community
- New users flood in
- Users flood the community with low-effort content to karma farm
- Community now sucks.
It happened to basically every big sub on Reddit once reaching a large enough size.
Someone should make a meme out of this!
Feel free, !fedimemes@feddit.uk is always welcoming content!
Oh honey…
Lemmy is not nearly large enough to fall victim to that.
Plus we don’t have the financial incentives to allow it. Reddit turned Karma-farming into a literal business model.
There’s a github issue request to solve this:
Add a local user setting to filter out image / meme posts, similar to NSFW filtering https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/4988
Doesn’t look like this addresses meme comments, either image or text based.
That’s up to the /c/ moderators
My theory is that memes made the internet worse but nobody wants to talk about. If I were getting my masters in behavioral science, I would be studying the impact of memes on Internet culture.
I love memes but I would still be interested in reading your hypothetical dissertation.
Growth accelerates
Seems to be a nice problem to have
!newcommunities@lemmy.world for people looking for active communities
There’s Usenet, no memes but also sort of dead and suffering from spam
karma farm???
As a community grows in popularity, it often shifts from hosting insightful discussions to attracting memes, funny, and low-quality content.
Seems the simplest thing would be to start a parallel memes community. So, for example, if it was an issue on !movies@lemm.ee we’d look into a movie memes community and those that don’t want memes can just block it.
Farmers will be farmers. I couldn’t play dust ii for a long time because everybody was farming on a casual server. Like get a job bruh.
