I’m not sure it’s a “simulate” but rather that memes and other low effort posts expand wherever they are loosed to fill as much space (both storage and mental) as possible. They’re easy to make, easy to post, and easy to consume.
A (new) lemmy instance provides such fertile ground.
The Reddit founders maintained that evil things which require active moderation didn’t happen too often, provided you build the right kind of community voting and flagging mechanisms. I can agree with that. We’ve found that to be true on Stack Exchange as well. It’s almost enough to make you a believer in the fundamental goodness of human beings.
Almost.
But there’s a deeper, more insidious problem that creeps into systems when the community is unmoderated. Stuff like, say, compilable James Bond Java ASCII art …
…
… and so, so many more.
These sorts of posts are wildly popular with the community. The cartoon question alone had over a million views by our extremely strict view counter — which easily translates to at least two million views, possibly three million. We don’t hate fun here, but we discovered that these posts become so popular over time that they truly start to drown out everything else on the site.
It is quite possible for memes and jokes to overtake an instance. When looking to see “do I want to create an account on this server because the local feed is interesting and other neat people are here asking interesting questions” and seeing it filled with memes… it can get discouraging.
… and this gets into “The Algorithm” which tries to prevent one community from dominating the local feed.
Ya it’s a little concerning how quickly people shifted to posting low effort crap in bulk in order to simulate a bigger community
I’m not sure it’s a “simulate” but rather that memes and other low effort posts expand wherever they are loosed to fill as much space (both storage and mental) as possible. They’re easy to make, easy to post, and easy to consume.
A (new) lemmy instance provides such fertile ground.
For some nostalgia… https://stackoverflow.blog/2012/01/31/the-trouble-with-popularity/ … which has some “heh, what a coincidence” parts to it too as it was comparing Stack Overflow to Reddit.
It is quite possible for memes and jokes to overtake an instance. When looking to see “do I want to create an account on this server because the local feed is interesting and other neat people are here asking interesting questions” and seeing it filled with memes… it can get discouraging.
… and this gets into “The Algorithm” which tries to prevent one community from dominating the local feed.