this post was submitted on 12 Mar 2025
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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. The most popular seem to be lighthearted clever little truths, hidden in daily life.

Here are some examples to inspire your own showerthoughts:

Rules

  1. All posts must be showerthoughts
  2. The entire showerthought must be in the title
  3. 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
  4. Posts must be original/unique
  5. 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.

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[–] Snazz@lemmy.world 1 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

in a colloquial sense, from an end user's perspective, the thing they see is "the algorithm".

Yes, usually the default or most common method of aggregating posts is what people talk about when saying “the algorithm”

However, any method of sorting posts is by definition an algorithm. “top” is an algorithm, “new” is an algorithm, if you can compare two posts and have a method to choose which one to display first, that right there is an algorithm.

I’d actually argue that the “hot” algorithm is one of the more opaque ones. It sorts posts based on a composition of different metrics, and It’s unclear exactly what these metrics are and how they are combined.

[–] blackberry@midwest.social 2 points 14 hours ago

yeah totally, but those are basic algorithms and most lay people don't even realize them to be. also I doubt many developers would show their boss "hey I built this awesome algorithm, it sorts by up votes" or "by time created" and continue having their job unless they built a recommendation engine per user or demographic, which is the generic corporate standard

which is why I like Lemmy/fediverse. it lets things be much more "organic" for lack of a much better word