I was eagerly anticipating "I'm looking for a gift for my aunt".
This is good feedback, the Mint team could definitely streamline things, maybe even with a "help pick".
Because it's not immediately apparent which to use (Cinnamon/MATE/Xfce).
I'm not sure how the resolve the mirror issue, sadly.
The cost of serving the data directly would be very high, but doing so would avoid scaring people. Unfortunately, it's hard for them to 100% guarantee every mirror is safe (even though they are!), which means they have to leave instructions on how to verify.
Selling pre-loaded USB sticks would be very cool, but people would have to be interested enough to spend £20.
Thanks for the post, it persuaded me to get off my bottom and add another one to the list.
This is the thing, the balance of anonymity and preventing people using that anonymity to be a tit.
In my opinion, one of the answers is keeping the signal-to-noise high: Make sure that there are enough sensible people in a community that if someone starts acting up, they're alone. And then they can either correct their course, or get banned, ideally before the next moron shows up.
And part of the way of achieving that is raising the barrier to sign-up, if only a little, and rate limiting.
Just for context, the full database of feddit.uk compresses down to about 4GB. I am not sure what's going to happen to the ghosts long term, but I don't think storage will be a huge issue.
And the shoe will probably drop at some point. Something like "communities must have nitro to access posts from more than 6 months ago".
Or that 50% of the users on the discord only went there to find one thing, and probably won't ever interact again.
So it looks like a bigger community, while losing accessibility.
Why Discord took off as a medium to replace forums is beyond me
My theory is that it was used as the primary form of informal communication by groups doing something, then it felt like a community.
And since everyone was there...Why not put the documentation there? Sure, it's not indexable, but the group is open-sign-up, right? Right?
Then a few years down the line, someone suggests switching to another primary storage location...Then faces huge amounts of push-back from people comfy sitting on discord.
What's even more crazy, is Adobe has a system called something like "docusign", where you can just fill the document in in-browser.
I'm fortunate that I haven't yet hit a form I couldn't just edit in GIMP!
Exactly that.
With the current ceo, it's been hyped beyond value.
One day, the value will return to the actual value.
If the ceo is changed, it will happen pretty rapidly, then the company can grow from there.
If the ceo is not changed, the hype will continue until either a breaking point, or the ceo changing.
So the shareholders have voted for the thing that preserves the status quo a little longer. Road-runner as it is.
And the ceo seems to have managed to extract a large chunk of the current hype money, in exchange for not changing the status quo.
I'm still of the opinion that the basic message app should only be SMS.
Then anything else should be its own thing. Mixing the two is a recipe for disaster, where it's a consumer product.
I'm shocked, I say. Shocked!
The idea of an app being used to gather additional dat~~e~~a from a customer!