I’ve noticed a pattern where once a subreddit or Lemmy community reaches a certain size, the front page becomes mostly memes, recycled jokes, and lowest common denominator content. Genuine discussion gets pushed out unless the community is extremely strictly moderated for it.
What do you think causes this shift? Is it inevitable with the upvote/downvote system rewarding quick, agreeable content over nuanced takes? Or are there platforms or moderation approaches that successfully scale discussion without turning into an echo chamber?
I faced this problem a lot on reddit when my subreddits took off. The closest I got to identifying a cause was with the volume of posts. At a certain point, the daily volume is so high that posts have to compete for attention to get on the front page. The quicker a post can be read, the faster it will be upvoted and the more the algorithm will weight it because it got early interaction. This gives posters an incentive to make memes, images, and jokes instead of an effort post that takes ten minutes to read. New users attracted to the snowballing population see a page full of these posts being upvoted, so their default incentive is to post what already works. Old users are turned off by the stale regurgitation of the worst posts and leave, so you only have new subscribers posting references to things they weren’t there for.
Hexbear has remained pretty consistent even back in the 2016-2020 r/chapotraphouse days because it’s consciously meta-modernist. We’re coming out of irony-poisoned postmodernist forums like reddit and hate how that shaped interactions. The in-jokes have their role but aren’t the feature, with effort posts being something the community rewards. Usually comment threads will have good discussions because they’re niche topics that the users are passionate about, and removing downvoting helps to discourage anything but discussion even when you disagree with someone.