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 1 month 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.

[–] Echo5@lemmy.world 9 points 1 month ago

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

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