As for the ages here, the people most likely to migrate are the long term Reddit users that have had an account using third party apps since 2010 or so (because younger people have only ever known the official app). That self selects for anyone that was old enough to use Reddit in 2010 back when the user base was mostly high school / college / recent college grads. Someone in their late teens / early 20s back then will be in their 30s now.

Stress is relative to your own personal conditions. It's not absolute. A tech executive might have a nice house and financial security, but if he's working 80 hours/week under intense pressure to meet some deadline, that's still stressful. Nobody wants to be perceived as a failure at work, even if their personal financial consequences for failure are minimal.

Your argument seems to imply it's impossible to feel stress if you're comfortable in life. Even the poorest Americans can count on access to food, clean running water, electricity, internet, etc. For most of humanity's existence, and still today in some parts of the world, these would be considered enormous luxuries, so anyone with access to them would be seen as extremely comfortable in life. Clearly though, people can still be stressed out despite having access to these sorts of things that most of history would consider luxurious.

Stress is relative, not absolute.

The play to earn model is literally a ponzi scheme with a fancier name. The money you earn has to come from somewhere. It doesn't appear out of thin air. In 100% of P2E games, the earliest players get paid by the revenue from later players. Eventually, the game stops growing, so the later players are left holding the bag.

Obviously, some people make a lot of money in ponzi schemes (most notably, the people that start the ponzi scheme in the first place), but it's a terrible design for people that aren't the ponzi creators or the first adopters lucky enough to get in on the ground floor.

Defederation works against that though. When I first joined a few weeks ago, a lot of the discussion was taking place on Beehaw. I joined a few communities over there and started to enjoy the experience but in an instant, all of that was blocked because Beehaw decided to defederate from Lemmy.World (and others). That sort of thing will happen more and more in the future. I don't want to have to create a dozen different accounts on a dozen different instances to view the content I want to see: I want a simple interface with everything in one spot.

Reddit offers the "everything in one spot" piece, but they killed the simple interface possible via apps like RIF and replaced it with an abysmal official app.

Lemmy offers the "simple interface" piece with apps like Jerboa, but the federation aspect of it makes it hard to get everything in one spot.

The second a competitor offers both features with a large enough community to allow for meaningful discussion, I'd be happy to make the switch.

It might feel like forever in internet time, but it's only been two and a half weeks since the thing imploded and two weeks since the rescue operation was called off after finding debris from the Titan. Two weeks is lightning fast for a company to formally shut down in response to something like this, especially when you consider that the company's employees have been grieving the death of their CEO/friend during all of this.

Why? You should let each post stand on it's own merit.

First, account age is silly for Lemmy, as almost 100% of people on here will have an account creation date in June 2023 or later because this place was a ghost town before Reddit decided to kill the APIs. A month from now, is someone with an August 2023 join date automatically presumed to be a troll, or are they just someone making the switch from Reddit a month later than everyone else?

As for karma, neither negative karma nor positive karma really tell you anything about the poster:

For instance, people can make good faith arguments advocating for conservative political opinions, but because the user base skews pretty far left here, those arguments will be downvoted. A discussion forum that bans opposing viewpoints is useless, and the echo chambers on Reddit are something I'd love to avoid here.

Similarly, it's also possible to effortlessly build positive karma. Simply copy/paste highly rated comments from the last time a common repost appeared on the feed, and chances are, your copy/pasted comments will get upvoted too. You can even automate it with a bot.

Karma meant nothing at Reddit, and moderators shouldn't be using it for decisionmaking purposes. It's useful for ranking posts and comments, but anything beyond that isn't helpful.

In what context?

In the insurance world, you sometimes see the phrase "L+ALAE Ratio" to refer to the ratio of (losses + expenses) divided by premium. It's a way to measure profitability for a book of insurance business: how many dollars of loss and expense do you have to pay per dollar of premium earned? Lower is better, and you don't want that ratio too much higher than 100%, because that means premiums aren't high enough to cover losses (though investment income can sustain small underwriting losses).

I could see "L+" used as shorthand for "L+ALAE" or "L+ALAE+ULAE," though admittedly, I've never seen that specific shorthand used.

Doubt it. It's just dumb low effort posting over here trying to force inside jokes on Lemmy. I blocked all of that sort of stuff back in the day on Reddit, and I blocked it here too.

I almost exclusively read non-fiction, but I just got done reading Slash's autobiography (the guitarist for Guns N' Roses among other projects), and that book kept me absolutely hooked from start to end. I have no idea how he's still alive after the wild stuff described in that book.

I shifted from that to a book about the history of the US Postal Service last week, so it's a pretty big contrast in tone.

Open Street Map is legitimate. In bicycling communities, Strava is the gold standard app for tracking rides, and it uses Open Street Maps on the backend. It's always super accurate for me, even for fairly obscure bike trails off the beaten path.

Just as a quick FYI, on the PS4 (and presumably the PS5 too), if you click on any of the hidden trophies, you can press square (I think) to show the description of how to earn it. This wasn't possible in the PS3 era, but it's one of the upgrades they implemented in PS4. That'll save you a Google search.

As for why, as others have mentioned, it's mostly for spoilers or hiding easter eggs that are more fun if you find them naturally rather than going out of your way looking to earn a trophy.

I was gifted Reddit gold a few times over the years for random comments I made, which gave access to the lounge subreddit. It's mostly nothing but dumb memes roleplaying as gilded age oil tycoons and the like. Definitely not worth paying anything for access to it.