Man, scale is such a hard thing to get intuitively.

I mean, yeah, Linus Sebastian has a huge following. It’s a huge following of self-selected nerds, though. Most people have no idea who he is. Wouldn’t even know what he’s talking about if you showed it to them.

And that was one thing that he did once. That mostly nobody cared about unless they are an active Linux fan. Which is itself a tiny niche.

Humans just have a hard time parsing when things are big or small, particularly if it’s things they are a part of. This is not stupidity, it’s just how human perception works. It works both ways, too. A lot of mondern media is about having these parasocial relationships with huge media personalities and thinking you’ve found some hidden gem only to find out that your grandma follows them already.

It’s not that we’re dumb as a species, it’s that we’ve created this ecosystem built specifically to exploit human perceptual limits for profit and now it’s all we have. It kinda sucks.

Sorry, I went places there, but this whole thread (and honestly, the entire Lemmy linux community) makes me think about this constantly.