Fediverse memes

I hated when my posts got popular on reddit. 10k-1m+ people suddenly being aware of my existence, trawling my profile, filling up my inbox with replies and PMs- just a miserable experience that made the website overwhelming for days. Hexbear topping out at like 120 upvotes is the sweet spot for not being overwhelmed but still getting quality engagement in the comments. At most I think a post could get 1000~ without becoming nonsensical, which I think might have been where /r/chapotraphouse topped out.

Whenever the subreddits I ran surpassed 50k subscribers, the algorithmic incentives immediately undermined the things which made that community good. The volume of posts is so high that any individual one is lost unless they can grab attention quick. That's where the "epic narwhal bacon" shit comes from. In the time it takes to read a multi-paragraph comment, users can upvote a dozen meme ones. Newcomers only see the memes and know that's how they fit in, so the whole thing snowballs into a parody of whatever the community was originally about. Quick growth comes at the expense of the forum's ideological coherency and all the internal struggle sessions that form it.