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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[–] JupiterRowland@sh.itjust.works 1 points 11 hours ago

If you really want entire lemmy instances to be 100% meme-free, the mods would have a lot to do because they'd have to read through every last post and comment.

Just like not every picture with text in white Impact with black outlines is a meme (it has to be established as such), memes aren't only pictures with text in white Impact font with black outlines. In fact, they aren't always pictures. They can just as well be text, embedded in other text.

Any catchphrase can be a meme. Snowclones are memes, too. Snowclones are the memes of the analogue era. They date back to the analogue era, to the mainstream media of the 1970s, the 1960, the 1950s, as far back as William Shakespeare, as far back as ancient Rome, and I'm pretty sure there are snowclones from ancient Greece.

I can't imagine the mods of any one Lemmy instance reading through all posts and all comments and sanctioning everyone who has dared to use a decades-old snowclone in it.

(Whoever finds a meme in this comment may keep it.)