I agree with another commenter that this not something that people consciously think about when they do it. I think the main thing you’re touching on is groupthink. This is the reason that groups of people behave differently than you’d expect individual people to.

Positions of leadership (and therefore power) as an institution are traits passed down to us from Feudalists who organized society in hierarchies. I would say groupthink allows these kinds of social structure to continue long past the point that people realize there a better ways because they assume other members of the group are okay with them.

That’s all not to mention the fact that some people are genuinely skilled leaders or that people in positions of leadership are going to have a bigger influence in what is accepted in the group.

I browse all and I would say there’s more content now than when I joined. It’s much easier to find content where actual discussion is happening too

PopSci is tricky because on one hand, it’s great that there’s a lot of interest in learning about science and it should be promoted, but on the other, the vast majority of research is so complex that you literally cannot explain it to the layman without making it wrong in some way.

I believe that the massive scale of corruption that exists within the capitalist system necessitates rebuilding from the ground up. Part of the solution is going to be intentional communities (I hope anyway) where we’re building communities with the intention of solving some of these large scale problems (scarcity, pollution, racial injustice, etc) in the community. There’s a collection of already existing communities on ic.org where you can find resources on how to build a community or where to find them. There’s every flavor of community whether you’re looking for a commune, a spiritual community, an eco-friendly community, permaculture, etc.

We live in a sick society, so don’t let anyone tell you you’re the one who’s ill because the full time cycle of work-eat-sleep wears you down. You’d have to be sick to enjoy this system.

The system that requires you and I toil away day by day is temporary. One day (maybe not soon) we won’t have to work our lives away, either because we’ll need to survive or because the collective consciousness will finally realize that we’re living post-scarcity.

Either way, that’s what I look forward to and in the mean time I just do what I can to make sure I’m not completely miserable.

Of course Reddit won. Not to diminish the efforts of everyone who participated, but all we’re doing here is sowing the seeds for something that might compete one day. There was never a chance of a full platform shift within the set two days of protest or whatever. Give it time, we’ll see Reddit squeeze every penny it can out of its users after IPO. Then, maybe as time goes on people will be looking for other places to go and Lemmy or some other platform will be a more viable option. It took Reddit over a decade to get to where it is, so of course we shouldn’t expect an equal competitor to pop up in a few weeks.

Do you value your time?

It really does work that way. In fact, I’d say attention is one of the most valuable things on the internet. Giving something your attention not only implies it has value to you, but it gives that thing actual monetary value for advertisers.

Here’s a link to a site with more examples: https://gonaturalenglish.com/connected-speech-fast-native-english-pronunciation/

This is called connected speech, I think your specific examples would be assimilation where two sounds blend together. There are lots of other sub-topics of connected speech too. I’m sure this pops up in most other languages as well because if you natively speak a language, it’s likely that you’ll naturally find yourself connecting words and sounds. Great question, reading up about this was interesting.