Hey, the Golden Globes is in January and the Oscars are in March, and I really, really want to be a winner instead of a nominee this year, can you blame me?
So why do people buy 3000 dollar mechanical watches when a 20 quartz dollar watch can keep time better? Why do people buy 300 dollar mechanical keyboards when a 20 dollar rubber dome can also get words on your PC screen? Why do people spend thousands of dollars on Magic the Gathering cards when you can buy the same number of cards for 20 dollars?
Being into designer fashion isn't much different than other expensive hobbies, and the cost benefit of a hobby item is the last thing on the mind of any enthusiast provided they can afford it.
You can see that clearly with both Twitter and reddit. There is no worse feeling than spending time to write something with thought only to not have anyone interact with these posts at all, while tired one-liner and ragebait gets a ton of likes and comments.
However, Lemmy's algorithm doesn't really punish writing long form contents the same way reddit does from my experience, so I feel more free to take a little bit longer to write out my thoughts here compared to elsewhere.
I try not to. With work email, you should write it as short and to the point as possible, no one really has time to read an essay instead of trying to get their job done.
Part of the reason I use Lemmy is for writing practice, because I want to prove that as a person that I can't be replaced by an AI. This place basically forces me to think on my feet to write quickly on an ever changing set of random topics and get my point across clearly and effectively.
There is an interesting, and almost universal phenomenon on reddit that every time a subreddit gets past about 40,000 subscribers, the discussion quality immediately drops off a cliff, unless extremely harsh moderation policies are implemented to explicitly weed out low effort content which brings its own set of problems.
My theory on why this occurs is the scaling power of moderation. I think you computer people are probably very familiar with the concept of scalability, and that size is its own challenge at the hyperscale. So for a centralized system like Twitter or Instagram or Facebook, moderation can only scale vertically, so a huge moderation team is needed to contend with the scale of these platforms alone, which also forces the need of personalized recommendation algorithms to promote this that are actually interesting to individual users.
Reddit was able to partially avoid this phenomenon with the subreddit system, which means everyone was able to effectively manage their own, smaller subgroups who shares common interest without intervention from the site admin/mods to achieve a form of pseudo-horizontal scaling. You can also see the success of that with Facebook Groups, which are one of the few reasons why people still use Facebook for social media even though they do not want to interact with the current Facebook audience.
Lemmy, and the rest of the fediverse platforms would suffer the problems even less, as now every group admin can now be completely independent from one another, which means that real horizontal scaling can be achieved and hopefully preserving the discussion quality to a degree as it grows.
Lemmy supports both blacklist and whitelist federation, but the only large instance that uses whitelist federation as far as I know currently is Hexbear.
Having an entire school to teach kids how to play children's card game doesn't seem so ridiculous, now, does it?
(It still does.)