But even if you drive the car into the ground there is still an associated cost per year as a result of buying the vehicle.

I think that is a feature

Wunderground was awesome until IBM bought it

Votes being public has made it possible to learn a bit about how people interact with posts. I’ve always used the downvote sparingly and I think that is how most people operate, downvoting only what doesn’t contribute to discussion and upvoting what I agree with. But it seems a minority downvote very frequently. There are some accounts that downvote the vast majority of posts in certain communities. Sometimes these accounts have zero posts and comments. Which is pretty odd - disagreeing with so much while never sharing your opinion.

The decline of Reddit is a great shame. But the model of social media companies needing to IPO and make profit always hurts users in the long run. When Reddit do IPO more decisions will be made that make the experience worse for users simply because the interests of the platform owners will no longer be aligned with the interests of the users. We can’t know how things will work out but at least the fediverse model is new and is theoretically more sustainable.

You’re right lemmy could take off provided people engage. The transition is primed for thanks to Twitter educating us about the fediverse.