• BornVolcano@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      So there’s people on Lemmy. People are fucking stupid. Someone posted beans. The random, unexpected nature was comical. The amusement caused upvotes, increasing popularity, which led to a bandwagon. This bandwagon then became itself popular, creating a meta-commentary on Lemmy’s obsession with beans. This unintentionally drives new interest in a sociogenic positive feedback loop driven by a conscious or subconscious desire to feel included in the growing social trend. This will continue until the majority of people lose interest and both the meme and it’s meta-commentary (arguably a more important driving factor in the continuous popularity than the actual content) and begin to shift their focus elsewhere, or express negative responses that capture the popular opinion. This breaks the cycle, and drastically drops off the interest in the trend as stragglers are penalized for the “posting old memes”. It then dies off save for a small portion of the community who continues a vested but dwindling interest who will section the content off to a new, smaller community, which will then be known solely for that trend. Then a new trend emerges and follows the same pseudo-popular feedback trend.

      That help?