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.

  • Jupiter Rowland@sh.itjust.works
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    15 days 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.