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.
This is kind of up to the individual community, not the instance as a whole. An instance theoretically could make a general ‘No memes on any community on this instance’ rule but it would be awful to enforce, and it’d be easier to leave it up to communities.
That said, I think Lemmy is a long way off from having the userbase or popularity to create that problem, and the absence of karma or any analogue really narrows the impact. Personally, I’ve seen significantly less low-effort content here than on Reddit, with the exception of a few specific communities that exist for that purpose specifically.
Agreed. This is a community issue, not an instance. As an instance owner I have communities that are meme based and communities that are discussion. It’s up to the mods of those communities.
Also what is serious content? I host a Taylor Swift community and to them the content that is there is serious. To others it is not. So to define it like OP is trying to do doesn’t work at an instance level. Communities are already built up to be that way
Op if you don’t like it, switch to subscribed instead of all. Curate your own list of communities you like instead of trying to get everyone else to change All
Growth accelerates
Seems to be a nice problem to have
!newcommunities@lemmy.world for people looking for active communities
Tildes fits that description. The posts are text-only or links to websites. No memes.
I use that site in addition to Lemmy, not as a replacement but a supplement. It’s just a different flavor of discussion.
It’s invite-only but I can give you an invitation code if you’re interested. Take a look, see if you like it, and send me a private message if you want an invitation.
Tildes is NOT a good website to recommend.
I made a Tildes account many years ago when it first started up. I knew the founder was a Reddit admin, and I’d heard that it was a haven for Reddit admins & power-mods, but I hadn’t spent much time there.
I recently made a post about the problems with Reddit, and while there were intelligent people and comments on there, the majority of votes went to people who were being extremely dishonest, and even outright lying; attacking me in every way possible while urging the admin to ban me. Neutral people don’t behave like that. So they couldn’t have made it more obvious that Tildes is merely an extension of authority-figures-of-Reddit with a different UI. All the same problematic people & behaviors exist there.
Based on the accusations one of them was making, and my history they were pulling up, one of them was either a Reddit admin or someone in cahoots with one of the Reddit admins that banned me. Tildes is invite-only, and the main accounts attacking me were brand new.
The Tildes admin removed my comments debunking the lies they were telling, and deleted my account.
I think you’re reading way too much into the goings-on of social media. Attempting armchair psychoanalysis of people you don’t agree with usually gets you the response you’ve been getting.
As they say, if everywhere you go it smells like shit, might want to check your shoes.
If only we had a time machine. We could go back to 1998 and assassinate Joe Meme before he ever invented the damn things. That’s what I would do. Oh and take care of baby Hitler.
