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.

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[–] glimse@lemmy.world 15 points 4 weeks ago (10 children)

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.

[–] Eggyhead@fedia.io 2 points 4 weeks ago (6 children)

I just see memes as an extension of language. When we read English, we can sound out the words if we want, but we really just recognize the words as a whole and understand their meaning. Kind of like a kanji or a glyph. I think of memes as really powerful evolutions of this. People can communicate really complicated or nuanced emotions very simply and clearly with a meme. It’s like a kanji using actual art and imagery rather than strokes. Not saying we’ll be communicating strictly through memes or anything, just that it’s a way we are communicating, and you can’t really control the way people talk.

[–] JupiterRowland@sh.itjust.works 1 points 3 weeks ago

People can communicate really complicated or nuanced emotions very simply and clearly with a meme.

Exactly. A single image macro often says more than a 1,000-word essay.

Of course, it only works if the recipients understand the meme. Luckily, some are pretty obvious.

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