this post was submitted on 09 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:
- 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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A bunch are usually people disagreeing and making up situations to make themselves right… i.e., you posit that the sky appeared blue when you went outside today, the replies are: not if it’s night, not during cloudy days, etc. and at least one that sounds like they disagree but are reiterating what you just said.
I've made this observation before, but the funniest thing about Lemmy is that !ShowerThoughts posts elicit more controversy than !UnpopularOpinion. Like, someone posts "I love pineapple on pizza" in !ShowerThoughts, and it's downvoted to hell with people writing long essays about how pineapple on pizza is justification for bringing back shock treatment. The same thing posted to !UnpopularOpinion brings out a mob of people saying how not unpopular an opinion that is, quoting statistics about how Hawaiian Pizza is the most popular pizza in America. It's absolutely hilarious, and one of the few areas where the Lemmy community is truly contrarian just for contrarian's sake.
With the exception of populations of some instances which I won't hex by bearishly naming, and a few individually excessive dicks (or trolls, but I think most are really just assholes), the Lemmy community tends to argue in good faith, admit when they're wrong or have had their minds changed, and are generally polite netizens in most exchanges. But !ShowerThoughts and !UnpopularOpinion just being out the contrarian in people, for some reason.
I'm here for the essays. To read them...and to write them.
Have to get it out of my brain.
Unpopular opinion is just posting things that plenty of people actually agree with. Like pineapple pizza. An actual unpopular opinion would be something like agreeing with restricting abortion or something difficult that elicits very strong feelings.
But do we really believe the posters think what they're posting is a popular opinion? Maybe they really think it's unpopular, because of their IRL experiences, or what they see online.
I think it's because people know what's unpopular, but the heavy stuff, they don't want to be associated with. So they choose milquetoast unpopular opinions, which aren't really unpopular as much as maybe a minority. Like, a majority of voters voted for Trump, but thinking Kamala would have been better isn't unpopular, it was just the minority opinion among people who got their fat assess out and voted.
Now, saying "only white, biologically born males should be allowed to vote" would be a truly unpopular opinion, but although there are absolutely more than zero people on Lemmy who believe this, no way in hell they're going to post that.
So people stay with "safe" unpopular opinions, like... "NYC is the ugliest city I've ever seen." Sure, you'll learn some new insults from the responses, but nobody's going to troll through your post history and throw it in your face in every argument, or follow you around and downvote everything you post because of it. Ok, maybe some New Yorkers will do the latter, but you know what I mean.
Consequently, because they're just minority and not truly unpopular, all of the people who agree come out of the woodwork, incensed that this entirely reasonable opinion would be posted a being "unpopular."
Thank you for coming to my Ted-L talk.
Actual unpopular opinions are not allowed on unpopular opinion
Similarly actual shitposts are banned in shitposting communities.
True. They probably get downvoted to oblivion.