I've been developing a theory of Reddit in my mind for about the last year. It's mostly grown out of the ubiquity and monoculture of AdviceAnimals/memes, but I think it applies to most of the frontpage reddits.
Redditors have basically developed and distributed a set of rules for what they find funny/cool/interesting, and endlessly repeat these same jokes/memes. If you follow the frontpage for any reasonable amount of time, you see the same few ideas over and over. Just about everything is somehow referential to a previous post. It almost feels Pavlovian after a while. Someone will post a picture with an attractive female in it. Someone else will comment with a Gif of a bunch of hotdogs being thrown in her face. Someone else will point out that hidden amongst the hotdogs is a finger. Someone else will point out that every time an attractive girl is posted, all of these things occur. This happens over and over, countless times every day. To call it derivative would be generous, because it's a carbon copy.
Advice Animals (Image Macros with text) seemed to take this to its extreme. The same 10 images are posted thousands of times per day, with a sentence about how some event in the posters life relates to the meme. If you take away the meme, and simply tell the story by itself, its dull and boring. Attach it to the same picture you've been seeing for the last year and half, and it's got 1000 upvotes.
Most of the material on the frontpage of reddit is not interesting on it's own merits. It's only interesting in the context of the thoroughly homogeneous userbase that has been conditioned to respond to the same 15 memes.
It seems to me like an advertiser's dream demographic. A clearly delineated set of rules to engage millions of potential customers. Flip this switch, turn that knob, show this meme, reference The Big Lebowski, and Bob's your uncle.
> If you take away the meme, and simply tell the story by itself, its dull and boring. Attach it to the same picture you've been seeing for the last year and half, and it's got 1000 up votes.
IANA Literary Anthropologist, but: when you tell a story from your life by itself, you're presumably telling it about you. People don't care about you: they've never met you, and after they read your words they'll probably never hear from you again. They don't have any previous impressions of you to pattern match their expectations against, so nothing you say can make them go "oh, yeah, that's just like her" or "ha, I knew it" or "oh god, it's going to happen to him again, isn't it?"
In the context of an image macro, on the other hand, your story is paraphrased into a sort of shared mythology: there's this one platonic Awkward Penguin/Insanity Wolf/Scumbag Steve, doing all of these things, and acting as a larger-than-life moral symbol of the effects of doing these things in the process. People know what to expect of the character, and so people can seek out these stories when they want something with that "feeling" to it.
Presuming you were living in Ancient Greece, you'd see these same people taking various minor heroic moments from their day-to-day lives, exaggerating a bit, and turning them into stories about Hercules.
(You can do this for a living, too, creating characters from whole cloth who are larger-than-life molds to match up to various day-to-day stories. The result is called a sitcom.)
People genuinely care about stories. A story about a wacky inventor is better than a story about their invention (see everything by Malcom Gladwell). Maybe a meme is better, since you already know the main character.
Or maybe there's a trade-off - a long story needs a new main character, but a short joke works best with a stock character. Compare War and Peace to "little Johnny" jokes.
I know the comment i'm about to make actually follows the rule you just outlined - but it's really about which subreddits you're subscribed to. The general advice I give when introducing someone to the site is to ditch most of the default subreddits and pick ones that relate to things they're already interested in. Small subreddits have really great communities and are still generating useful and interesting conversations.
The front page of reddit isn't really where the community shines. It represents the greatest common denominator of internet culture, which is pretty much what you described, fueled by kids. A while ago, reddit split off into sub-reddits, each with their own culture and moderators who do their best to keep up quality of posts. For example: reddit.com/r/TrueReddit
On the contrary, tmuir's theory of reddit is a fair description of most subreddits (maybe all subreddits) which become popular without having very strict and dedicated moderation.
It does not describe smaller niche subreddits, though, that's true. They still have their own unique personalities.
I think it has a fair claim to be called theory of reddit, because it seems like any subreddit can go downhill in that way if it becomes popular. They converge on a point of mediocrity.
It is several million differing opinions distilled into one aggregation. It will, of course, be the lowest denominator of commonality. And the result of that is a firm entrenchment in belief, so you get that homogeneity. It is a positive feedback loop, but it is anything but niche at this point.
Redditors have basically developed and distributed a set of rules for what they find funny/cool/interesting, and endlessly repeat these same jokes/memes. If you follow the frontpage for any reasonable amount of time, you see the same few ideas over and over. Just about everything is somehow referential to a previous post. It almost feels Pavlovian after a while. Someone will post a picture with an attractive female in it. Someone else will comment with a Gif of a bunch of hotdogs being thrown in her face. Someone else will point out that hidden amongst the hotdogs is a finger. Someone else will point out that every time an attractive girl is posted, all of these things occur. This happens over and over, countless times every day. To call it derivative would be generous, because it's a carbon copy.
Advice Animals (Image Macros with text) seemed to take this to its extreme. The same 10 images are posted thousands of times per day, with a sentence about how some event in the posters life relates to the meme. If you take away the meme, and simply tell the story by itself, its dull and boring. Attach it to the same picture you've been seeing for the last year and half, and it's got 1000 upvotes.
Most of the material on the frontpage of reddit is not interesting on it's own merits. It's only interesting in the context of the thoroughly homogeneous userbase that has been conditioned to respond to the same 15 memes.
It seems to me like an advertiser's dream demographic. A clearly delineated set of rules to engage millions of potential customers. Flip this switch, turn that knob, show this meme, reference The Big Lebowski, and Bob's your uncle.