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.
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.
I love memes but I would still be interested in reading your hypothetical dissertation.
https://medium.com/@max.p.schlienger/the-cargo-cult-of-the-ennui-engine-890c541cebcb a fascinating essay on the subject
Thanks, saving that to read later!
I just see memes as an extension of language. When we read English, we can sound out the words if we want, but we really just recognize the words as a whole and understand their meaning. Kind of like a kanji or a glyph. I think of memes as really powerful evolutions of this. People can communicate really complicated or nuanced emotions very simply and clearly with a meme. It’s like a kanji using actual art and imagery rather than strokes. Not saying we’ll be communicating strictly through memes or anything, just that it’s a way we are communicating, and you can’t really control the way people talk.
Memes are nothing like logographs (“kanji”) linguistically speaking
I’ve heard this argument before and it doesn’t make sense to me. Memes include words and people generally don’t express nuanced ideas through memes. They’re all about saying as little as possible using a slightly altered version of a scripted scene. It’s a devolution in language, not an extension of it. And it’s a cancerous one - you get more attention online if you appeal to the lowest common denominator by using a meme template so why think on the subject any further beyond that on? Hell, why even make something yourself when you can copy and paste it from your favorite meme bucket (Instagram, reddit, etc)
More like using as few words as possible while relying on the scene for the context.
If I tell you:
It sounds pretty normal. Am I happy? Sad? Apathetic? Communicating without expressions or gestures often leads to misunderstanding. Have you ever got into an argument with someone online because they misunderstood the intent of something you said? Maybe you forgot your sarcasm marker? Well, if I had opted to send you
instead, I would have also told you that I more or less feel disgusted about myself without actually adding any more words, or even typing anything at all because it’s already in the image.
Now I won’t agree or disagree either way whether it’s a cancer, I don’t really care. It’s just another way I observe people communicating. I’ve heard people tell me the way African Americans speak is "destroying the language.” It’s not. It’s just a dialect that manifested where a void was left to be filled. Memes do something the regular alphabet does not.
Unrelated, but look at gen alpha slang. Kids too young to know correct English learn their words through games and memes, often outside of direct parental supervision. So if they need to express something more abstract, they do so using words that seem close enough and sound nice, referencing ideas that others in their circle can quickly and easily comprehend. Suddenly some popular tiktokker uses it and then that word is codified in the vernacular. Most of it will fade away as they get older, but some of it might stick around and get absorbed into the greater language.