this post was submitted on 05 Jul 2023
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Showerthoughts
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A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. A showerthought should offer a unique perspective on an ordinary part of life.
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One benefit that people don't talk about enough is it naturally tends towards smaller community sizes than in a centralized system which is a better fit for our tribal human brains.
We're not great with speaking into a room with 1,000 people in it, much less a million.
The problem is that it's worse for keeping topics centralized and fragments communities for external reasons. It's antithetical to the idea of a link aggregator where you centralize all of your news if you need to use several of them to make it work. Defederation should be a last resort to protect the admins from legal action, content manipulation, or brigading, not because beehaw thinks open signups harm their safe space. Making the internet a safe space is how we got to this point with Twitter/Google/meta/reddit, and everyone wants to do it all over again to rebuild their echo chambers.
Perhaps keeping topics de-centralized is a key part of keeping systems from turning tyrannical. That’s the theory behind the term “totalitarian”: that too much unification of thought produces behavioral restrictions, via the justification that if the truth of each topic is known and indisputable, then there’s no reason to share power in society as long as the person in power knows the One Truth.
Centralized systems designed to uncover one clear answer, such as stack overflow, have every reason to fight against redundancy in answers. Anything rightly called a community though should not be built around the (totalitarian) idea that conversations are best centralized and made non-redundant.
Big important questions need to be rehashed millions of times, not just covered once with millions of audience members.
99% of the content people post and interact with doesn't have a reason for multiple copies of it's conversation to exist. Most content is consumed not discusses.
Yet when a person arrives and asks a question they are discussing. If they wanted to consume, the could.
And the vast majority of the users consume the answers, not the discussion. They don't ask the questions, hey look them up, and if no one asked, or no one answered, they can't find anything and just give up. They don't ask.
And some of them don't even bother with trying to look it up. They just ask, because they like that method of getting information.
Most communities do not like when people come in asking the same basic questions over and over again. I don't think you understand how link aggregators work.
I don’t think you understand how communities work. Conversations get repeated all the time in communities.
A community for determining the answer to each question once should be structured like stack exchange.
Reddit is a place for discussion.
reddit is a link aggregator. its for people to find links, post them to relevant groups who then evaluate the quality and relevance of that post, and then vote to bring it up or down in the feeds of people subscribed to that group. that's how reddit works. its a very poor way to hold discussions because it means any unpopular opinion gets downvoted by ignoramuses who don't understand that they're evaluating for quality not for agreement. reddit is not a place for discussion.
Then what are we doing here, right now?
being unproductive.
Exactly. Reddit was designed as a leisure activity not a tool to get work done.
You've completely lost the plot.
I’m enjoying myself. You’re not accomplishing anything. I’m fine over here based on my goals.