this post was submitted on 23 Aug 2026
71 points (87.4% liked)
Showerthoughts
43475 readers
301 users here now
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. The most popular seem to be lighthearted clever little truths, hidden in daily life.
Here are some examples to inspire your own showerthoughts:
- Both “200” and “160” are 2 minutes in microwave math
- When you’re a kid, you don’t realize you’re also watching your mom and dad grow up.
- More dreams have been destroyed by alarm clocks than anything else
Rules
- All posts must be showerthoughts
- The entire showerthought must be in the title
- No politics
- If your topic is in a grey area, please phrase it to emphasize the fascinating aspects, not the dramatic aspects. You can do this by avoiding overly politicized terms such as "capitalism" and "communism". If you must make comparisons, you can say something is different without saying something is better/worse.
- A good place for politics is c/politicaldiscussion
- Posts must be original/unique
- Adhere to Lemmy's Code of Conduct and the TOS
If you made it this far, showerthoughts is accepting new mods. This community is generally tame so its not a lot of work, but having a few more mods would help reports get addressed a little sooner.
Whats it like to be a mod? Reports just show up as messages in your Lemmy inbox, and if a different mod has already addressed the report, the message goes away and you never worry about it.
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Is it still really a win for them here on Lemmy where such algorithms are, to the best of my knowledge, non-existent?
No, the algorithms are always there - otherwise, there is no "feed". It's just that the algorithms here have no hidden weights to drive engagement towards specific topics/posts. Not that it can't still be manipulated, but that's often detectable behind the scenes, too.
Probably yes? We do have some algorithms, "sort by hot", "sort by active", etc, so there is value to getting to the top of those lists.
sort by scaled is my current setting. To my understanding from the description (I forgot where it's described) it is sort by hot but taking into account the size of the community of a post and put it up more the smaller the community is.
I think so personally, because it's still engagement and I'm assuming it probably contributes to the MAU number which could in turn attract more users
Any intentional choice made to capture human attention functions as an algorithm.
For instance, when a creator posts an intentionally silly title, it triggers a predictable urge in users to comment on that silliness. This deliberate cause-and-effect cycle means the creator's strategy itself is the engagement-driving algorithm. A good example of this human-designed system is ragebaiting which systematically uses manufactured outrage to multiply views and comments