ELI5: Explain Like I'm 5
Do you demand a simple and concise explanation of complicated and complex topics?
Fret not, dear voater, for ELI5 is here! Ask a complex question, and get a simple answer!
General guidelines:
Your explanation should be friendly and straightforward, but not condescending.
- 1.1. Above all, you're here to answer questions concisely. Don't get needlessly hostile or complicated in your response.
- 1.2. We aren't literally 5 year olds. Well, most of us aren't. We can handle big words and long sentences. There's no need to dumb down an explanation unless specifically asked to do so by the asker.
- 1.3. If specified by the asker, responses to particular levels of expertise are encouraged.
/v/ELI5 is a place to get simple explanations of complex topics.
- 2.1. Yes/no answer questions, and questions pursuing an answer without an explanation of that answer, are not allowed.
- 2.2: If it doesn't have an explanation, it isn't an explain like I'm five question.
- 2.3. Refrain from posing hypothetical or personal questions. Ideally, every question should have a factually based, reasonable explanation.
Feel free to send prohibited questions to /v/nostupidquestions, they'll help you out instead!
This isn't a debating subverse:
- 3.1. Don't ask for personal opinions (and don't ask potentially loaded questions)
- 3.2. Don't present a biased response
Top-level comments should be on-topic.
- 4.1. Self-explanatory, really.
- 4.2. Jokes are allowed and appreciated if they're on topic and not a whole top-level comment.
Someone came here for an answer, don't send them somewhere else.
- 5.1. Your response should not consist wholly of a redirection link within a sentence.
- 5.2. It is acceptable to link to outside sources for singular words or concepts. This can be done to save you explaining concepts that are non-central (yet still important) to your response.
- 5.3. Don't copy+paste from outside sources without paraphrasing. Outside sources don't always explain concepts in layman's terms.
Don't know? Don't teach.
- 6.1. If you don't know what you're talking about, don't try to teach someone else about it.
You are allowed to post a question that's been posted before, but to save your own time, search for it before posting anyway.
Tag your post as "Explained" once you're satisfied with an answer
All moderation decisions are made at the moderation team's discretion. You won't be protected by loopholes if you're using them to a detrimental effect.
Now featuring CSS, by /u/jvanderb!
The Questions Network
Own a questions subverse? Doesn't match any of the ones above? Send a mod a message, and we'll gladly add a link to it!
view the rest of the comments →
[–] mastercactapus 0 points 2 points 2 points (+2|-0) ago
Imagine you and some friends were playing apples-to-apples. Then imagine hundreds or thousands of people show up to play. Everyone from the grocery store, everyone from school, the whole town. If you just buy more games, then yes, everyone can play sure. But they wont be playing the same game; and you need everyone playing at the same time, the same game. (e.g. if you make a post, or upvoat, everyone needs to see it) So now you have enough cards, but now each round who ever is being the judge needs to go through thousands of cards and it takes forever.
The problem with scaling is that not all parts can scale like that. You can get more servers, but somehow all of those new servers need to be in sync. If you make a post on one server, it needs to store that somewhere that all the other servers can see it, but all the other servers are also submitting posts. The places where these issues come up are often referred to as bottlenecks. Fixing or widening these "bottlenecks" is most likely where most of the time is being spent.
Additionally most of these problems require solving problems creatively, writing code or tools etc.. And it's not really something you can just push more people at either. Puzzles take time to solve, and it takes time to work through those scalability problems. Especially on short notice. It's kind of like wack-a-mole sometimes.
[–] ghostwriter [S] ago
Thank you for you excellent response, I get it now. Sorry I couldn't reply sooner, Voat was down...