What is /c/196, and why does it show up so much on All

History wise

195 was a college dorm of a few friends who made a reddit sub to share memes with each other

Over time the sub grew really fast and became a major shitposting sub. I dont remember if it was while 196 was still around or after it shut down, but r/196 was made and became pro lgbt while 195 was kinda a cesspool. The guy running 195 shut it down because they were no longer dorming together or talking, and it was becoming hard to manage a huge sub alone with so many people posting hateful crap

196 became the weird trans femboy lgbt shitpost sub

197 popped up because people didnt like the lgbt stuff and it kinda became more like 195

196 moved here but a lot of people jumping to lemmy havent actually interacted with 196 before do theyre just posting whatever whenever

That's a great explanation. I love the idea of having an "internet historian" (other than the actual internet historian, who really doesn't talk the origins of the internet). I guess there's the meme databases but still, this is a great read.
- Yeah, what's up with Internet Historian's more recent videos? When I first found the dude, he literally did just do history about internet stuff. Now it all just seems like half hour long shit posts with no real info about anything in particular. Just strings of "lol so random" type humor.
Best of lemmy summary here
Amazing history! Thank you.
I was apart of r/196, I never knew there was earlier iterations, I thought it was just a drop a meme and go style place. this is actually interesting.
Oh thanks. I used to see them pop up on Reddit and never really got what it was about.
- What's missing from this description is that the main rule of that sub/community is that you can't leave without posting something, hence all the "rule" memes.
Thank you for this explanation
I wish I could give you an award
- Cut that shit out. Just thank them and move on, awards were useless trinkets that fed the spezmachine

It's a meme community where the only rule is you have to post something before you leave, that's why a lot of posts say "rule". The reason it's so popular is because it used to be a super popular subreddit called /r/196.

As for why it kinda turned into an LGBT-specific community, beats me.

Every meme community becomes a trans shitposting paradise or an alt-right nazi gamer hellhole after it reaches critical mass. There's no alternative.
- /s
r/196 became all lgbt stuff, so it followed over. IIRC the mods were really trigger happy with removing stuff that didn't align super close with them politically.

r/197 formed as a direct response to this, and while at first they had issues with too much bounce back to the right with some gross anti-trans memes, once the dust settled and new mods were added, it became the best sub for just mindless shitposting without worrying about fitting a political theme.

Don't know but I blocked it.

Ahh! I finally found how to block it. All is suddenly more useable
- Blocking is ok, but subscribing to communities you care about and viewing by subscribed solves a lot of irritation.
Same

The second part of your question is the easiest. It shows up all the time because you haven't blocked it yet!

To add to this, to block communities, you need to go to your “home” server (ie where you have a lemmy account), navigate to Settings > Blocks and then search for them under “Block community”. This cleaned up my “all” feed.

e.g. https://imgur.com/a/7SRBBJE
- For me, the search doesn't find a lot of communities.

Lemmy is young, so an enthusiastic community of a few hundred people can control the flow of the front page if they all upvote everything en bloc. I've had to block several meme pages for that reason. It will eventually even out, probably.

Like I don't hate memes necessarily but I hate meme communities. Forced memes are the worst.

Pro-tip: you can block communities that annoy you.

Similar post https://lemmy.world/post/76057

Thank you! Very helpful
Nice sub/community lore post! 😆

It shows up so much on all because you haven’t blocked it yet. Go ahead and kill shitposts and memes while you’re at it.

Yep this is the best advice. Block memes, shitposts, and 196 and your feed will look much nicer

i've blocked a few of the meme communities, not because i hate memes that much but just because they take up too much of my feed too.

I think it shows up so much on all because the algorithm for "hot" kind of sucks. I read earlier that subs that are more active get pushed to the top more than others. Not sure if that's true, but that would explain why random subs seem to pop up on hot so frequently.

It would be pretty cool if we could tune the algorithm by changing the weighting for how active/hot works...
- We probably can, Lemmy is open source.
- D...dad?

thanks for letting me know that exists so i can block it before i see anything from there

Gotta read the rule. I'll subscribe to it for a day or two and then get tired of it. Read the rule and you'll understand.