this post was submitted on 06 Jul 2023
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Asklemmy
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Growth for growths sake.
Not just at a platform level but at a community level too. Around 6 or 7 years ago I started to really notice people talking about growing their subreddits, making changes and tools designed to increase the subscriber count.
For what? There's nothing to gain.
The main subreddit I modded finally became impossible to moderate for quality when, despite our lack of "growth strategy", the influx of new users became too much for the communitys culture to persist and it slowly turned into a lowest-common-denominator topic-flavoured meme ghetto. And from the outside I saw many of my favourite subreddits fall to the same scenario.
So I would say, we should avoid or rethink the idea of growing lemmy for its own sake. Eternal September will come eventually, lets not rush it
Got in a few arguments about this on Reddit. Some cool niche sub where the amount of possible posts was naturally limited, but you knew each time there was a new post, it would be a good one. But then the occasional meme or "sub name taken literally" post would find it's way in, got upvoted by people just scrolling through r/all and the mods would keep it b/c "people upvoted it".