MantidSys

Normally I’d say that reddit/lemmy are poor choices for a community - but if the competitor is a live-chat like discord? Yeah. Lemmy is better.

Project leads would just need to make sure to direct users straight to a specific instance that allows instant/unmoderated sign-ups, or else that element of friction will occur – and certainly not start the whole “there’s many instances, pick the one that’s right for you!” spiel, or users will give up immediately. I thought similarly about matrix - on-boarding users to a matrix community would be helped by explicitly writing a guide for them to do so, but then we’re back to step 1, where making a discord channel is quicker than writing instructions.

Everyone in this comment section is yelling about how bad discord is, telling people to use forums or matrix instead. No one is asking “why?”. Why aren’t people using forums or matrix? Because the path to user growth isn’t guilting people into the ‘morally correct’ choice, it’s making a product they want to use.

Why are small communities using discord over forums? Well, we’re talking about small projects, hobbies, and volunteer work. Hosting a forum costs both time and money - renting server space and configuring/managing both the forum and the server. Making a discord channel is instant and free. You want your favorite project to have a forum? Then take up the mantle of hosting and maintaining it yourself. You want all projects to use a forum? Develop a forum system that you absorb the hosting costs for. Neither of these exist, so communities use discord.

Why are small communities using discord over matrix? I’m in my 30s, I spend all day on my PC, I’ve taken a couple years of college courses in programming. Figuring out matrix was annoying for me. I had to figure out which client program to use, I had to navigate the less-than-ideal way of joining servers, and there was a difficulty curve for understanding the program’s features and how to use it. It wasn’t impossible, but it took effort. Discord doesn’t. For every step of friction, a product will bleed users. Matrix is cumbersome to set up and use, and it’s copying something that already exists and does it better for the end-user experience. It shouldn’t be surprising that people prefer discord. Want that to change? Start contributing code to matrix and refine the user on-boarding process.

Instead of stating opinions, ask questions. That’s how things get changed. No amount of moral grandstanding will change end-users, no matter how correct you might be.

You have read these charts wrong. The 17B figure is 12-month trailing gross profit. You are referencing quarterly net income (and you’ve also made a typo, saying 406 thousand instead of 406 million). If you want to compare the “per resident” calculation (which I don’t even see the point of), make your units match. Trailing 12-month net income is 1.944B, so more like $50 per person.

Now to make the “per resident” metric actually have any meaning:
First, if we’re talking yearly profit skimming off of a utility, our goal is to estimate overcharges per billing address. Census data reports about 38.9 million residents and an average family size of 2.92 - but that’s not enough, because PG&E doesn’t serve the entire state. They serve about two thirds of the state - taking this into account, a very rough estimate (because population isn’t evenly spread across a state) is that they service 8.7 million households. Thankfully for us, they directly report how many households they serve, and the actual number is about 5.2 million.

$374. The average yearly bill for a PG&E customer is $374 pure profit for the company. Now that’s a more useful metric.

Oh, and that’s assuming none of their operating expenses are inflated - which they likely are. So that’s a lower bound for how much they’re ripping off each household.

/r/Place has always had massive country flags whenever it ran. But the way I see it, the largest murals need the most people working on it, and getting many people involved means having them all be connected in some way, and country-of-origin is the easiest way to do that. Combine that with the fact that the biggest non-English communities on western social media like Reddit (and Lemmy too, now) tend to be German or French, and it’s no surprise that the two largest murals are those flags.
You’d wish people would find something else to represent them and have fun with things like this, but people gravitate towards the largest groups they feel a part of. Low hanging fruit, I suppose.