My guess is with the protests that some of the top content creators moved away and never came back.

I remember sorting by hot once gave a wide variety of things and now it seems to be more drama posts like AITA posts.

Although it feels like I’m still following an ex, There was one place over there I used to visit a lot and I believe if you took a snapshot of the top ten posts of a random day few years ago and today, they’d be very different. Today’s seems to be a group picking up a trend and running with it and before it was more original content. I remember going there because I knew there’d be something new I’d likely laugh at or be amused by and now it feels heavily recycled.

The subscriber count is still way up, but I’d you look at the online/active user count, it feels like its around 10% it was off recent highs.

It felt like the sub had a ship of thecleus moment where it seemed to just be growing, but was also losing people until the group changed but the name was the same.

Someone else said the new reddit gold allows people to receive real money* if people gild their posts (by spending real money) * receiver must be in certain countries.

I saw a post recently on a wholesome memes page where someone tagged repost sleuth bot and someone else commented that todays post was literally a copy of the third top voted post of all time. It was.

I also remember that bot support got affected and this led to a spam detector bot being moved from active development to sunset mode where it was still supported but not actively enhanced.

It wouldn’t be all I’d eat, but lamingtons for dessert would be nice.

Lamingtons: a cake cut into cubes and coated with chocolate sauce and then coated with coconut. May be sliced in half to be joined by a later of cream.

You have a point of merging the Senate into the House.

I’m a fan of Australia’s federal voting system. We have a house of Representatives where the country is divided into 151 regions by geography of roughly the same number of people. One in Sydney is a few suburbs, the one in the south of northern Territory is almost the whole territory excluding Darwin.

Then there’s the Senate, where each State gets to elect twelve(six every 3 years[1]) Senators. Territories (Australian Capital Territory & Northern Territory) elect Two Sentors every election.

Everyone in the state gets a say in who represents them as Senators and allows minor parties to get representation as only 16% of the total vote is needed to get a seat. (The Greens typically get 1-2 of seats in each State)

So for areas with geographic issues get to have a say (rural people vote for the National party who represent farmers interest).

And there’s the occasional independent who gets in too and some other minor parties.

The other major difference is we have optional fully preferential voting. You can nominate anyone running in your seat as your first preference on voting day and you give everyone on your ballot a number from 1 to however many. When the Australian Electoral Comission counts the votes if the person you put first is eliminated from the count (they only get 175 votes from the 110,000 who cast a ballot), then your voting slip still counts and your vote transfers to your second choice.

Also we have compulsory* voting here. If you are enrolled, you are required to vote and will get a small fine if you don’t. *You might think all politicians are bastards and cast an unfilled ballot paper into the box, but you have had your ability to have a say. I’ll also note that people may take the time in the polling booth to draw a penis on their slip which isn’t illegal and doesn’t invalidate the vote a long as the intention for who is being voted for is clear. There are also prepoll stations and an option to postal vote exists.

We also have a tradition of voters getting a “Democracy Sausage” after voting. It’s common that voting stations (elections held on Saturdays) are schools and local clubs have barbecues and sell cakes etc as part of fundraising.

In summary, I like out two house system as the Senate allows minor parties to get representation where they wouldn’t otherwise if we just had the House of Representatives. [1] we sometimes have double disillusion elections where the government has the options to call one if they keep passing legislation in the house and the Senate keeps rejecting it and in that case all seats are vacated and the states elect 12 Senators, but it’s not normal.

Lemmy.world is still running Lemmy 0.18.x and will soon upgrade to 0.19.x and 0.19 has scaled sorting.

Improved Post Ranking There is a new scaled sort which takes into account the number of active users in a community, and boosts posts from less-active communities to the top. Additionally there is a new controversial sort which brings posts and comments to the top that have similar amounts of upvotes and downvotes

Source: https://join-lemmy.org/news/2023-12-15_-_Lemmy_Release_v0.19.0_-_Instance_blocking,_Scaled_sort,_and_Federation_Queue

I would use it as a network attached storage / media player running Linux.

It doesn’t have to be always on, and having copies of photos or important documents would give peace of mind.

Debian, Ubuntu and the raspberry pi os (they have an installer for normal computers, not just pi’s) would be distributions I’d consider with the pi os at the top of the list.

This comic was posted on Lemmy recently.