Is there a place to watch lemmy user numbers in real time? interested to see if there’s a spike as users try out something else with their new free time.

  • Kerfuffle@sh.itjust.works
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    1 year ago

    Don’t kid yourself. Reddit was valuable to pretty much all of you or else you wouldn’t continuously shitpost about it.

    It doesn’t really work that way. Lots of people visited subreddits like cringetopia, whatcouldgowrong, confidentlyincorrect, etc. Basically a compulsion to kill time by gawking at dumb people doing dumb stuff. That doesn’t mean those subreddits or that use of time had actual value, even to that specific person though.

    • tasty4skin@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      It really does work that way. In fact, I’d say attention is one of the most valuable things on the internet. Giving something your attention not only implies it has value to you, but it gives that thing actual monetary value for advertisers.

      • Kerfuffle@sh.itjust.works
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        1 year ago

        Giving something your attention not only implies it has value to you

        This is what we’re talking about: value to me specifically.

        If something has no benefit to me, I can see that doing it is a personal flaw but I still can’t resist the compulsion (could be anything: time wasting reddits, crystal meth, alcohol) then it seems really weird to conclude that I “value” it. I’m pretty sure most people don’t use the word “value” like that: it’s for something that has a benefit to the person. In this case, the “value” is negative if anything.