You know, for all the complaints I see of tankies, I have encountered 10x more people who incessantly complain about them.

How do you feel about Linux and leftist infighting?

And both of those things SUUUUUCK.

It’s actually built into plex. If you have a library of t.v. shows you can just click the Shuffle button and it’ll play random episodes. Or you can make Categories of shows and shuffle those. If you’re asking how to get started with Plex and downloading content, well…I don’t want to get banned for piracy related reasons, so I’ll just say that, totally unrelated to this discussion, there’s a wealth of resources regarding how to get started with bittorrent and usenet. Which you can use for perfectly legal purposes, like downloading Liinux ISOs and open source textbooks.

devastating to their bottom line in the long run if it works as planned.

Google knows their service is addictive and is banking on people being willing to eat an unlimited amount of shit in order to watch a bald man from Vancouver spend 12 minutes talking about his Peloton ride that morning. Realistically, they are probably right. There is no competition to YouTube. Hasn’t been for years. And there probably never will be ever again. Capitalism trends towards natural monopolies as infrastructure and complexity of operations makes startup costs prohibitive.

Man, you’re definitely spot on with this. For me, it’s a fast, easy source of superficial distraction that I can put on for background noise and don’t have to pay attention to. It’s ultimately what cable TV used to be for me. I’ll even leave on a streamer playing a game in the background on low volume if I’m going to sleep just for white noise. At this point, the behavior and desire for that kind of content is so ingrained in me that it’s sort of like an addiction. I wish there were alternatives to youtube, but that era of video content might just be straight up dying for some of us. I guess if anything I’ll start fleshing out my plex server with old t.v. shows and just put Gilligan’s Island or something on in the background.

That would be reasonable, I think. As you drill down into reply threads comments tend to become more focused on particular topics of conversation, in my experience, and so the size of any given reply might reasonably diminish.

Hmmm, not really. Rather, the community is specifically focused around conversation. But a different type of conversation. Typical internet conversations on reddit (and a lot of other places), especially over the last several years, seem to mainly occur in short bursts and at a fairly superficial level. The kind of community I’m envisioning is one in which there’s a central topic or theme (such as film), but it focuses on fairly deep or complex conversations. If someone wants to respond to a comment made by another user, it’d typically be point by point with supporting evidence and argumentation. Or at least a well reasoned perspective. An okay, if not spectacular, example would be this post on reddit from a couple of years ago on r/TrueFilm (https://www.reddit.com/r/TrueFilm/comments/khlrnv/a_brief_rant_about_my_cinema_students_and/). The post itself is a few hundred words and focuses on a central concept or observation made by the OP. Most top level comments are a paragraph or two. There are brief responses in the individual comment threads, but the actual discussion is fairly robust and provides new ideas and perspectives beyond just people saying “lmao same” or similarly useless comments.

Or restrict them to people who have something meaningful to contribute. Low effort vs. high effort. You’d have to be explicit that that’s the purpose of the community and that’s how it works. I remember some great posts on r/TrueFilm back in the day. A lot of it was by people who were either film students or who had degrees in film studies and had the kind of academic background needed to speak at length about a topic without it becoming trite. I have to say, I do miss it. The internet has gotten way dumber and way lazier over the years, in a lot of ways.

I feel similarly. To add to that, I don’t even like the fact that people have been pushing so hard for Lemmy apps. I get that people want something to entertain themselves with on the train or in class or wherever they might be, but phone based social media apps seem to encourage superficial engagement and doomscrolling by design. I much prefer a rich desktop experience as it encourages depth of discussion and debate. One thing I really liked on reddit, though, was something I saw a long time ago on r/TrueFilm. Comments had a hard minimum for characters. If your comment was below 250 characters, or something like that, it was automatically removed on the basis that if you had anything to say, you should have thought about it enough to warrant more than 250 character submissions. It also functionally murdered smartphone or tablet based commenting. I kinda wish you could do similar on certain lemmy communities.