this post was submitted on 03 Mar 2026
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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:

Rules

  1. All posts must be showerthoughts
  2. The entire showerthought must be in the title
  3. 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
  4. Posts must be original/unique
  5. 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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It's clearly a dark pattern thought up by shitbags because users are more likely to create an account after they've typed something out vs. leaving when they find out an account is required to participate.

Even the shitbags over at Mozilla are doing it.

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[–] invertedspear@lemmy.zip 4 points 23 hours ago

You’re right, you can see this with wire shark, or you can just use the network tab in your browsers developer tools.

But as a web developer, you’re absolutely wrong that we can’t collect every freaking keystroke if we want to.

Sometimes we wait for submit. Sometimes we collect everything as you move from one field to another, called a blur event. Sometimes we wait for the user to stop typing for like 1/4 or 1/3 of a second, called a debounce event. But we can collect every keystroke. We don’t concatenate them on the server side, we send the whole field value after each change, tied together with other fields based on a session ID.

Hell, sometimes we track your mouse movements as well. Where you move in the page, where your mouse lingers, how long you hesitate before clicking. A “good” company uses this information to make a better user experience. A nefarious one uses it to collect all your personal information without you ever clicking submit, and sees just how hesitant you were to disengage after being asked to pay. Then aggregate that experience to determine the price point.