I’m pretty sure the ratio of rude people in the entire user base isn’t the same when comparing the two platforms, so that plays a role too. However, I think it’s mostly a numbers game. Even if that ratio was the same, a bigger platform automatically means that you’re going to bump into a lot of rude people there. Think of it like this: If the ratio is just just 1%, that’s 1 in a small place and 100 in a big one.

On top of that, people tend to remember negative encounters very well. Even if you got only 1 nasty comment, it’s going to sting. If you got 100 comments like that, you’ll feel like the whole world is out there to get you. The human mind has this strange bias towards negative reactions.

Probabilities can be counterintuitive. Just because something has a low probability doesn’t mean it never happens. You can make those probabilities vanishingly small by stacking specific combinations like ethnic background, first language, country of origin, current country of residence, religious upbringing, and so on. The more you stack, the lower the probability of someone being exactly like you.

I once visited a science expo that demonstrated this by asking questions about traits like eye color, ear shape, and even quirks: Do you write with your left hand? Do you kick a ball with your right foot? Do you peek through a hole with your left eye? When you combine all these factors, everyone turns out to be a “unique” snowflake.

The counterintuitive thing is, even though the stacked probability of you existing might be astronomically small, you’re still here. Unlikely things happen all the time. If you expect to see a specific rare event, you’ll be waiting a million years. If you look at events that have already occurred, you’ll find their probabilities were just as tiny.

It’s unlikely.

The probability of a random English speaking person being Irish is approximately 7.1856/1493 ≈ 0.00481, which is a pretty low number. There just aren’t that many Irish people.

Fair enough. Should have gone with C#. Would make a lot more sense. For some reason, my mind was wandering in all the wrong directions when writing that.

That would make more sense. Best of the both worlds.

The idea behind Python is to get the community to contribute. More people know Python than Assembly or Fortran. At some point, running a FOSS project like Piefed becomes a numbers game. Having more developers is useful in the beginning.

If Piefed grows significantly, it might make sense to rewrite the whole thing in a different language, but right now, contributions matter more than efficiency.