Are there any Lemmy instances or similar platforms that don't allow memes?
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.