The solution is to start downmodding these posts as soon as you see them.

I've been accused of being too uptight about bawling people out for violations of reddiquette, or posting content-free comments, or posting things in the wrong subreddit (eg, self questions in web_design rather than askreddit), but this is exactly what happens if you don't.

By the time you've noticed that there are an awful lot of questions being posted in the wrong reddit, lots of other people have noticed too, so they conclude that that's what the subreddit's for... and so every time they have a question they post it, and the subreddit turns to shit under the influx of newbie questions.

This mechanism holds true for pun threads, those interminable fucking lyrics-quoting threads and similar things.

They're fun at first, but by the time they've stopped being fun they've got a momentum of their own, and then there's fuck-all you can do to stop them.

The only cure is to be more mindful and responsive to small incidents, so it doesn't have time to become a trend.

Reddit's done a fairly good job of not immediately turning into Digg as it's grown, but this is exclusively because people jumped on the "typical Digg" responses when new people made them. If they'd gone "Ho, yeah, that one's kind of funny so I'll upvote it until it gets boring and then start downvoting them" then reddit would be no better than Digg now.

If you don't like these things, consider the wider implications of your votes and use them more wisely. Pre-emptively spot and vote down things which aren't worthwhile - content-free comments, easy jokes, uncreative "switch the words around" followups, etc. Don't "give the first few a pass", because all you're doing it encouraging other people to post more of them.

Other examples:

• Pun threads, though finally these seem to be dying off a bit as people realise how pathetically easy (and hence really quite undeserving of upvotes) they are.

• Lyrics threads. Yes, you recognise a song and know the words... or you can Google for "first line" lyrics and cut-and-paste the next line into a comment. Well done. Have a cookie. Do not have a bloody upvote, because you've done nothing worth doing, and you've managed to make my reddit comments page fractionally more irritating.

• Twitter-style "@whoever... " responses. Reddit is not Twitter. We have a working replying mechanism, so use it. If you use it, the recipient will be pro-actively alerted to your comment and there's no need to preface it with their name. If you don't, they're highly unlikely to ever spot your message simply because you stuck @their_name at the top.

• Inappropriate newbie help questions, on whatever subject. If they can't use Google, a mailing list or one of the many, many websites set up specifically to handle newbie questions on any given subject, WTF are they doing cluttering up reddit? Also, there are always a lot more newbies out there than experienced people who can answer their questions, so any resource that seems to answer newbie questions will always get deluged with them in short order. We have the initialisms RTFA, RTFM and GIYF and the website lmgtfy.com for a reason.

Pant, pant, pant... pant... pant. Ahem.

/lawn, etc. ;-)