This subreddit has 500k members now - are we losing the plot?

Quirk Reports just hit half a million users and I'm genuinely concerned we're becoming a victim of our own success. Three years ago this was a tight community of actual researchers and enthusiasts. Now it's full of people posting "I saw a weird cloud today, aliens?" and low-effort meme rubbish.

The moderation team can't keep up. Every popular thread gets flooded with debunkers and trolls, plus the usual influx of people who don't read the sidebar and ask questions that get answered in the FAQ seventeen times a week.

I'm not saying we should shut the doors or go private - that defeats the purpose. But I do wonder if this level of growth has changed the culture for the worse. We're becoming more like a mainstream subreddit and less like a place where people genuinely investigate weird things.

Anyone else feeling this or is it just me being nostalgic for the "golden age"?

It's basically inevitable for online communities. Good moderation slows it but you can't prevent growth without active gatekeeping. The early users will always prefer how things were.

That said, yeah, the signal-to-noise ratio has dropped. But there's still good content if you filter properly. Sort by upvotes, ignore the meme forum, check verified posters.

We could have megathreads for common topics? Like a weekly "I saw something weird" thread where people post sightings and actual researchers can filter by region or phenomenon type. Would reduce spam and keep the forum cleaner.

500k is fine. Every community goes through phases. Reddit's the only platform these discussions can happen on anyway without getting censored. Better a large messy forum than seeing genuine researchers isolated and ignored.

The debunkers are actually useful though. If we only had believers we'd just be circlejerking. Having sceptics keeps people honest and prevents the most obviously false claims from going unchallenged.

Golden age fallacy. Probably seemed smaller because you knew fewer people. The good content's still here, it's just buried under more posts. Nothing inherently wrong with that.