Another thing to consider with that, coming from someone who has a Google Play subscription, is that the bandwidth use can be murder on a cellular plan. It's a problematic endeavor when you have a limit amount of space on the phone, a wide taste in music. and a small amount of data available to you. That's without considering having spotty coverage in some areas, which can also be a plague for some people. So, in many cases, downloading your music onto an external hard drive while at a friends place is more suitable for some people versus being subscribed to a service that they might only get a limited use out of it.

In general, the streaming capabilities of phones suits a lot of people. But there are going to be those edge cases where someone lives between two hills in the middle of nowhere, leaving them to try and stream with either spotty cell service or over the phone lines. If there can be a method to help support those people as well, I'd be all for it.

Having a bit of experience and second hand experience with a brother teaching overseas, the basic breakdown for Chine, Japanese, and Korean is generally as follows:

- Chinese has tones and tons of characters. If you can hear the tones, speaking it isn't that hard from my experience. The grammar is relatively similar to English, in that it follows the Subject/Verb/Object format, which makes it easier to get started. Afterwards, it's just learning the newer syntax for some of the sentence structure, and that doesn't take too much time to learn. As for writing... Lots and lots of repetition. They learn the characters by sitting down and writing them over and over and over again, which between that and flashcards, is the easiest way to learn the characters to read the language.

- Japanese is relatively easy to start out with, given that it has an alphabet system. Well... Two, actually. The sounds are very similar to what we use in English overall, but get some nuances that you have to take a lot more time learning and are often time really subtle (The difference between saying pants and panties in Japanese is dependent on how you say the last vowel in the words, for example.) The grammar is all backasswards in comparison to English, following a Subject/Object/Verb syntax, which anyone who's taken French or Spanish will have some experience with. For me, the grammar was the hardest part when I studied it briefly before, which ended up leading me to Chinese instead. And let's not get started on honorific forms and whatnot.

- Korean is very, very different from English. Whereas in Japanese you have a sound system that's very similar to English, and Chinese you have a grammar system that nearly mirrors English in many cases, in Korean you have neither of those. Like Japanese it's S/O/V, and they make frequent use of sounds that are never used in English, which further complicates trying to learn it when you don't have anything to compare it to. While it isn't a tonal language, the unfamiliar sounds that are hard for a native English speaker to pronounce will be a tripping point for a lot of people.

Hope someone out there finds these tidbits useful!

Stormfront style factoids

I think those should be challenged, not banned.

I'm going to raise the point that challenging their stance leads nowhere, citing personal experience. When it comes to the Stormfront "facts" they cite, in many cases they're ignoring huge swaths of the sources they cite, because it has a relevant statistic to their point, but disregard the entire premise of the paper as "excuse making." The stretch they go to present a fake group bias on the issue as well as in general spreading disinformation leads to toxicity when left unchecked. The downvoting system at Reddit wasn't able to handle the surge of Stormfront users, resulting in a large swath of Reddit looking racist. In reality, it was just a very vocal minority spurred on by the new users who thought that was the norm. They got exactly what they wanted, a fake group bias and a few misinformed facts leading people on the road to sharing that same Stormfront dribble elsewhere. It's toxic, unintelligent, and overall a blight that needs to be taken care of instead of allowing it to fester.

I understand your point on the basis of principle, but in practice it leads things open for growing a toxic and misinformed community, that takes people giving up on replying as a sign of victory versus someone being tired of wasting their time arguing with a brick wall.

You honestly end up having to treat it like trolling to make it go away, by ignoring and downvoting it instead of challenging it. It's a lot harder for them to spread misinformation when the community can silently disregard them all together.

That's at least my feeling on it.

Smaller communities tend to help with the direction of a website a lot more than having a larger userbase. Once the userbase gets big, you end up playing with the bottom of the barrel types. When you have a smaller community that tends to take the time to write out and explain thoughts more clearly than a handful of punchlines, you end up setting the bar a lot higher for them to get involved. Once upon a time, Reddit would crucify you for making a simple typo, or for posting things without giving a well thought out process and possibly even a source or two. That ended up changing once the site grew larger and the community diversified. Where Reddit was once overall pretty liberal, it ended up leaning in a more libertarian direction, once what was just a small minority ended up getting more members and became less afraid to share idea that would disagree strongly from the old school Reddit.

The site has changed a lot over the 4-5ish years I've used it, and it progressively was losing everything that I had liked about it from before. Now I'm finding what I liked in Reddit, community wise, here at Snapzu. Just maybe.. At an earlier point in it's life cycle, anyways. :)

I was part of this one forum at one point in time. These guys wanted to make the forum the "next big thing", with their only offering being that you could express yourself and use the site as a platform of free speech, without being censored (barring illegal content). What it ended up being was a group of power-abusing mods and admins trolling the very small user base very early on, driving people out before it even got the chance to grow into anything. From there, a few database mishaps and the entire forums getting lost on more than on occasion lead to everyone leaving except for the mods and admins themselves. Anybody who was friends with them didn't remake their accounts after everything had been lost.

Moderators can make or break a system, and it really comes down to whether they're lax about thing and intervene appropriately, or if they're in it for a power trip.