I am loathe to comment on this topic due to it being against the site guidelines but I have noticed a distinct up-tick in both meme comments and shallow joke comment threads. It’s a little cringe to read, but there is still plenty of substantiative conversation here, so I wouldn’t exactly say it’s turning into Reddit; but there is definitely an element of Reddit (and 4chan for that matter). I think it’s increasing, but I don’t have the data to back it up. For now I can just downvote unsubstantial comment trees and move on.