this post was submitted on 29 Jul 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:
- 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.
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Most internet forums are this way. Reddit users are also on average more technically literate than average. In fact I'd say it's the more purely social media platforms where it gets back to close to normal. Twitter/Instagram/Facebook/etc etc.
Reddit used to be different too. It may seem stupid, but you used to get criticized on Reddit for making posts that were completely devoid of grammar and whatnot. It kinda functioned to a similar level of editorial sources, despite much of the information conveyed being silly memes and whatnot.
Personally, I think that people taking the time to write out things in a cohesive, thought out manner, versus shortening words (like "stg", looking at you OP) and the like, to me ends up with a better discourse. You're not rushing to spill out as many words as quickly as possible if you're taking a second to type it out correctly. Maybe just me.
But as with all things, popularity up, quality down.
I was on Reddit back from the beginning and around 2007-2010 it was a very well curated place due to this culture.
People didn’t comment unless they had something actually relevant and insightful to say. Researchers, engineers, lawyers, doctors/med students and all walks of life in between with professional or intellectual knowledge of the subject at hand.
It was great because the comments were vibrant with good discussion, links, and other ancillary information.
As all things that get popular, the quality declines in tandem.
It started out with the whole summer break periods when school kids were out and bored…then the digg exodus. Slowly, but steadily the quality declined as the user base exploded. Large subreddits were increasingly shit so you’d have to stick to the more niche subs.
The API debacle was finally enough for me to strip all my comments and delete my account.
Lemmy is not quite at the level of when Reddit first started. I find that outside of a handful of commenters per notable post, most are not very knowledgeable, insightful, or otherwise providing quality discourse. I will say that it’s not consistently the case, as sometimes (depending on the topic), it does remind me of those old times. There’s still hope lol
You reawoke memories of summers on Reddit, hard to believe that was a thing, because it's been all year summer for the last decade it feels like.
I still post. There's niche subs that I still think are quality. I completely understand anyone deciding to leave, though, it's really a shell of it's former self. The algorithm that decides what's on top of your feed kinda ruined everything. I can sort by new, and somehow it's not sorted chronologically. It doesn't make any sense.