Life is plastic, it’s fantastic.

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.

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.

But I’m not cascading though…

Not normally, anyways. 💖

Wait, I’m CSS?

I don’t get it.

Well, I think “drowning” could be a bit much. Don’t want to make Linux sound that scary now.

I think there is a reason why “Learning Python the Hard Way” is so popular, because although it’s harder, it leads to learning better fundamentals which makes things easier in the long run.

So, I think OP should still give Arch a try, maybe he (they?) will be more receptive to this method, and there’s no harm in trying.

If you look at the original post, his goal is to learn and understand Linux and he is on his third attempt after already trying Ubuntu remix, which is why I made this suggestion.

Again, if he just wanted to use Linux on his computer, then there is nothing wrong with using a more user friendly distro at all. But for his particular needs he described, then Arch is a better distro for learning how Linux actually works.

My advice is to restart with Arch (I use Arch btw). Not Manjaro, I’m talking Arch.

I think using/installing Arch as well as its barebones nature FORCES you to understand how Linux works differently than Windows with concepts like root, bootloader, terminal emulation, and disk partitioning, just to give you some examples. At the same time, Arch has excellent documentation, a great package manager in pacman, and rolling release model that greatly simplifies maintainance during daily use so you can tune it to exactly how you want it.

I believe doing it the hard way at first will make it easier for you in the long run if you really want to understand Linux, and Arch is just the right amount of difficult to make you learn Linux, whereas Gentoo would be too hard and you don’t learn enough from using Ubuntu/Debian/Mint.

But yeah, if you just want to use something that works well out of the box, then Ubuntu is great, there’s nothing wrong with using the more user friendly distros.

She’s also a delusional wannabe cult leader and may actually be insane.

Translation: “Our project management sucks, and everything is on fire.”

Yeah, because the best part of reddit was the human interaction, and having bots proliferate everywhere just kills that entirely.

Bots on reddit are just so universally annoying and most of them provide no value at all. Most of them should have been banned on sight anyways.

If reddit decides to moderate the Piracy subreddit directly, does that mean that they’ll be responsible to respond to DMCA requests? If so, that’s going to be a shitshow all in itself.