Especially because for most of history magic was accepted as reality by most people. So any aspect of the elevator that didn’t make sense to them, like the buttons and power, could be attributed to magic without much consternation.

Nowadays most (non-religious) people think “well there must be an explanation, I wonder how they achieved that, I’ll get to the bottom of this.” But before public schools, the scientific method, and an understanding of the natural laws, regular folk would just accept the unexplainable as magic, ghosts, demons, etc. People accepted that Hermes’ shoes just worked, or that Jesus could turn water into wine.

Humans are inquisitive creatures sure, but we’re also superstitious creatures who would often rather invent an explanation than admit we can’t explain it. And when you live in a world where even a rainbow or the stars are unexplainable, you get used to mythical explanations. You grow up with the people you love and trust giving you these explanations.

It’s the outliers who had the time and disposition — Aristotle, Newton, etc — that we celebrate today for bucking that trend. But they were the exception, not the rule. Archimedes may have spent the rest of his days studying that elevator, but 99% of his contemporaries would have said “By Zeus what a marvelous gift from the gods”, stared at it for a while, and then returned to toiling in the fields and quarries.

Yeah

Doesn’t really matter since people upvote it anyway. Complaining about reposts and stuff is as much spitting into the wind on lemmy as it was on reddit. People hate that their one downvote can’t bring down a post, so they comment instead, get a few upvotes there, feel better, and then return to the same site they constantly complain about anyway.

Literally just taking top questions from reddit and posting them here to help drive engagement and get the platform going. Like you said no karma here so not sure what the aggressive tone is about. Glad the post police are migrating from reddit too though lmao that’s a good sign I guess

If you really feel like getting sentimental, check out this Wait But Why, specifically the “Relationships” section. There’s also this awesome Kurzgesagt video which was inspired by it.

There is absolutely no chance that this is the strategy lol

They simply weren’t turning a profit (or enough of one to satisfy shareholders), and had to look to cut unprofitable avenues (eg, Apollo doesn’t show ads). They came up with a number of users that they were willing to lose if it meant the remaining userbase was profitable. Who knows if they came in under or over that number in the end, but my suspicion is lemmy has cost them more than they thought. The protests reignited development of lemmy mobile apps, which was really the missing component in making lemmy competitive (and why Reddit deliberately only gave devs 30 days notice, otherwise we’d have Apollo-Lemmy already).

But to me, their actions align pretty well with a company preparing for an IPO. The age of “growth at all costs” is over, and they need to start demonstrating a healthy profit. I just won’t be any part of it lol

Ugliness is correlated with age, and ripeness is correlated with age, so ugliness and ripeness would at the very least be spuriously correlated.