I went to highschool and university in the US - I was lucky that I got a scholarship and that covered pretty much all my tuition costs.

But I had a friend, one year older than me, who joined and served in the US army for something like 2 years just so he could get his university costs covered and to save some money for living expenses.

It may not be intentional, but the high cost of higher education is an excellent recruiting tool for the US military.

lol @ the exact percent

But no, I don’t think shitposts by themselves are actually the problem. I think the problem is when when there’s so many people dedicated to making shitposts that serious communities with serious discussions start getting overwhelmed with shitposts, and when there’s so many people who are only interested in shitposts that they upvote those shitposts to the top, often downvoting anyone who might offer a contrarian non-funny opinion.

or IDK, I’m mostly speculating based on personal experience.

I think the fewer number of people, compared to reddit, on Lemmy combined with the fact that it’s not nearly as well known, plays a huge advantage to the quality of the comments. Not that there aren’t people like that here either, but I feel like the more popular a platform, is, the more it gets filled, proportionally, with people trying to make witty, shitty, pointless remarks that are often clickkbaity and avoid actual discussion, all in the interest of just getting more imaginary points.

Also the process of “enshitification” (not a term I made up, look it up if you hadn’t heard of it) has already started taking place on reddit due to its popularity.

And even then he never got promoted beyond Ensign.