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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[–] KoboldCoterie@pawb.social 55 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

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.tech 26 points 3 weeks 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