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.

  • KoboldCoterie@pawb.socialEnglish
    54·
    2 months ago

    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.

    • Scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.techEnglish
      271·
      2 months ago

      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

  • glimse@lemmy.worldEnglish
    14·
    2 months ago

    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.

    • Echo5@lemmy.worldEnglish
      9·
      2 months ago

      I love memes but I would still be interested in reading your hypothetical dissertation.

    • Eggyhead@fedia.io
      52·
      2 months ago

      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.

      • glimse@lemmy.worldEnglish
        3·
        2 months ago

        I’ve heard this argument before and it doesn’t make sense to me. Memes include words and people generally don’t express nuanced ideas through memes. They’re all about saying as little as possible using a slightly altered version of a scripted scene. It’s a devolution in language, not an extension of it. And it’s a cancerous one - you get more attention online if you appeal to the lowest common denominator by using a meme template so why think on the subject any further beyond that on? Hell, why even make something yourself when you can copy and paste it from your favorite meme bucket (Instagram, reddit, etc)

        • Eggyhead@fedia.io
          2·
          2 months ago

          They’re all about saying as little as possible using a slightly altered version of a scripted scene.

          More like using as few words as possible while relying on the scene for the context.

          If I tell you:

          I get off the computer, go to bed, then look at my phone.

          It sounds pretty normal. Am I happy? Sad? Apathetic? Communicating without expressions or gestures often leads to misunderstanding. Have you ever got into an argument with someone online because they misunderstood the intent of something you said? Maybe you forgot your sarcasm marker? Well, if I had opted to send you this image instead, I would have also told you that I more or less feel disgusted about myself without actually adding any more words, or even typing anything at all because it’s already in the image.

          Now I won’t agree or disagree either way whether it’s a cancer, I don’t really care. It’s just another way I observe people communicating. I’ve heard people tell me the way African Americans speak is "destroying the language.” It’s not. It’s just a dialect that manifested where a void was left to be filled. Memes do something the regular alphabet does not.

          Unrelated, but look at gen alpha slang. Kids too young to know correct English learn their words through games and memes, often outside of direct parental supervision. So if they need to express something more abstract, they do so using words that seem close enough and sound nice, referencing ideas that others in their circle can quickly and easily comprehend. Suddenly some popular tiktokker uses it and then that word is codified in the vernacular. Most of it will fade away as they get older, but some of it might stick around and get absorbed into the greater language.

          • Jupiter Rowland@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
            1·
            2 months ago
            They’re all about saying as little as possible using a slightly altered version of a scripted scene.

            More like using as few words as possible while relying on the scene for the context.

            Exactly that. And especially in social media, this is of imminent importance. Always remember that the Fediverse is not only Lemmy.

            I’m mostly active outside the Threadiverse. The Fediverse outside the Threadiverse is dominated by Mastodon and thus by people who refuse to read anything that’s over 500 characters long.

            But I’m not on Mastodon myself. I’m on something that doesn’t have a character limit. So the thoughts that I pour into posts are not necessarily simple enough for 500 characters. They don’t have to.

            So I could write an essay about them. Thousands of characters. But many Fediverse users (remember that Mastodon is 70% of the Fediverse) will ignore it because it’s too long, because it’s over 500 characters long.

            Or I could pick an appropriate meme template that’s best at expressing my thoughts and feelings and make an image macro out of it, adding my own text. By the way, I mostly hand-craft my image macros in GIMP. And then I post that.

            Sure, I do add some explanation afterwards where explanation is due. I link to the KnowYourMeme entry that explains the used template(s), and I link to what my image macro is about. If I can’t link to the latter, I explain it in my own words. But I do so after the image. If you don’t need these explanations, if the image macro works for you without these explanations, you can skip them without having to skip the image macro.

            A few examples (content warning: all these links lead to meme content):

            You could ramble on and on about how tricky and difficult something is. Or you can let Boromir speak for yourself: One does not simply implement FEP-ef61. If you think I’m just too lazy to type, check out the 25,000 characters of explanations right below. That was before I was told that linking to external sources is actually more convenient for readers than having such a massive pile of infodumps within the post iself.

            Here, I’ve commented on the bleak future (or total lack thereof) of three Fediverse server applications in only one fully hand-crafted image with only few words. This time, the templates weren’t images but phrases (“That’s cute”, “removed, please”). For comparison, the whole situation is explained below. Notice what a wall of text it is. Imagine exposing someone who’s used to Twitter to so much text.

            Another example: I could say that the history of Mike Macgirvin’s Fediverse creations is pretty complex. You wouldn’t have an idea of how complex it is. Or I could use the Pepe Silvia template to illustrate it. That’d give you more of an idea of how complex it is without me having to ramble about it and give you details that you haven’t even asked for.

            I could also have written an essay on the current spam wave on Mastodon, how it’s bad, but how I don’t care, and I don’t pity Mastodon because Mastodon had it coming with its self-imposed weaknesses, and Fediverse server software with reasonable safety features are not and can’t be affected by this kind of spam. Instead, I resorted to having Jeremy Clarkson of Top Gear and The Grand Tour speak for myself, using an image macro which I had made as a response to an earlier spam wave a while ago. Easier to understand with much fewer words.

      • Jupiter Rowland@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        1·
        2 months 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.

  • doc@fedia.io
    8·
    2 months ago

    For the most part memes are self contained to their own communities. It takes a few days but you can achieve a relatively meme free experience if you block each community.

  • Fitik@fedia.io
    6·
    2 months ago

    I guess the closest experience you can get is if you’ll just block all meme communities

    Idk if you can do it on Lemmy, but on MBin you can block communities (magazines)

  • Blackout@fedia.io
    6·
    2 months ago

    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.

  • OpenStars@discuss.onlineEnglish
    4·
    2 months ago

    Think of an instance like a vehicle (bicycle, train, car, airplane, etc.) while the content (posts) is the destination, which I guess makes the communities the city streets that arrange the content for easily going from one to the next. Anyway, the instance takes you “there” (wherever you want to go), but you can get there from most instances, or you can even make your own instance, so deciding your ultimate destination is not a great feature of choosing an instance (it’s actually much more complicated than that, but to a first degree of approximation that much is true - you can pretty much access meme communities from any instance, or block those communities regardless of which instance you are on, as you choose).

    At first there seems to be some exceptions, like startrek.website, but there too it’s just a convenience factor - you can subscribe to those communities from anywhere (that federates with it, e.g.lemmy.world) - or you can be on the startrek.website instance but block every one of those local communities (if you wanted) and instead post and comment all across the Fediverse in other communities.

    So it’s not proper to look at the instance level for a solution to this issue. And as for the community level, setting aside the communities dedicated to memes on purpose, the prime issue of memes appearing everywhere seems to be moderation or more apropos lack of it. If you wanted to start a serious community, about e.g. philosophical discussions (which already exists btw - press the community button and search to find several), then you could put in the actual effort to keep out such lower-effort content that you do not like to see. And if you do not like it, surely there are others who think the same. But somebody, somewhere is going to have to expend the effort to make it happen, or else it simply won’t.

    Also here’s a fascinating essay on the subject: https://medium.com/@max.p.schlienger/the-cargo-cult-of-the-ennui-engine-890c541cebcb. Reading that is a large part of what made me leave Reddit, and almost Lemmy as well, but being forewarned is forearmed so now that I know, I can limit myself and be alright with how I use social media. It’s a really good read!