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.

  • OrbitalEnglish
    4•2 days ago

    Tildes fits that description. The posts are text-only or links to websites. No memes.

    I use that site in addition to Lemmy, not as a replacement but a supplement. It’s just a different flavor of discussion.

    It’s invite-only but I can give you an invitation code if you’re interested. Take a look, see if you like it, and send me a private message if you want an invitation.

    • @MaximilianKohlerEnglish
      14•2 days ago

      Tildes is NOT a good website to recommend.

      I made a Tildes account many years ago when it first started up. I knew the founder was a Reddit admin, and I’d heard that it was a haven for Reddit admins & power-mods, but I hadn’t spent much time there.

      I recently made a post about the problems with Reddit, and while there were intelligent people and comments on there, the majority of votes went to people who were being extremely dishonest, and even outright lying; attacking me in every way possible while urging the admin to ban me. Neutral people don’t behave like that. So they couldn’t have made it more obvious that Tildes is merely an extension of authority-figures-of-Reddit with a different UI. All the same problematic people & behaviors exist there.

      Based on the accusations one of them was making, and my history they were pulling up, one of them was either a Reddit admin or someone in cahoots with one of the Reddit admins that banned me. Tildes is invite-only, and the main accounts attacking me were brand new.

      The Tildes admin removed my comments debunking the lies they were telling, and deleted my account.

      • @[email protected]English
        11•2 days ago

        Thank you for bringing that up.

        Having a single admin able to make any decision on the website just seems the core recipe for power tripping.

      • @[email protected]English
        0•2 days ago

        I think you’re reading way too much into the goings-on of social media. Attempting armchair psychoanalysis of people you don’t agree with usually gets you the response you’ve been getting.

        As they say, if everywhere you go it smells like shit, might want to check your shoes.

        • @dezmdEnglish
          2•2 days ago

          Tildes has been well known to be a trash pile from its earliest days.

    • @r_13English
      1•2 days ago

      Second that recommendation for Tildes. Not all posts are long but most posters tend to contribute well thought out opinions and the discussion I have seen is uniformly civil.