Welcome!

• The world’s population passed 8 billion on 15 November 2022, and has reached 8.01 billion at the start of 2023.

• Just over 57% of the world’s population now lives in urban areas.

• 5.44 billion people use mobile phones today (2023), which is 68% of the total global population.

• There were 168 million new mobile phone users over the past 12 months; (Jan 2022 - Dec 2022)

• There are 5.16 billion internet users in the world today (2023), meaning that 64.4% of the world’s total population is now online.

• Today (2023) there are 4.76 billion social media users around the world, which is just under 60% of the total global population.

• This year alone (2023), it is projected that there will be 137 million new internet users, indicating an annual growth of 3%.

• There is a direct, albeit delayed, positive correlation between growth in internet use and growth in social media users.

Great!  So what?

This is the stuff we hope to engage about here.

Before you raise an issue, ask a question, or begin a discussion, however, - please make sure to search for a similar question or discussion. You can search these by their title or tags.  It is also okay to answer your own question, and it is, obviously, also expected you will participate in discussions that you start, without necessarily taking a leadership or moderator role .

Please avoid asking questions or raising discussions that are not relevant to this community.

Try to ask questions, give answers, or make discussion contributions in a way that you are sure will make us all better people.  We depend on each other for this.  

To prevent your questions and other contributions from being flagged and possibly removed, avoid asking questions or making contributions that are uniquely subjective, emotive, or otherwise offensive.

​

As much as possible, answers should not comment on other answers. Instead, add your own comment or answer to the on-going discussion.

If you wish to include a link to external content, don't just paste the link.  Instead, give context and overview to what the link is about even if it's just a copy/paste.  Links are welcome, but should be complementary to answers, comments and discussions; they should be references for further or additional reading.

When a question or answer is upvoted, the user who posted them will gain some points, which are called "karma points". These points serve as a rough measure of the community trust to him/her. Various moderation tasks are gradually assigned to users based on those points.

For example, if you ask an interesting question or give a helpful answer, your input will be upvoted. On the other hand if the answer is misleading - it will be downvoted. Each vote in favor will generate 10 points, each vote against will subtract 10 points. There is a limit of 200 points that can be accumulated for a question or answer per day. The table given at the end explains reputation point requirements for each type of moderation task.

Not just anyone can do this.  The goal of forum is create a relevant knowledge perspectives around what is important for users.

Therefore, questions and answers can be edited like wiki pages by experienced users of this forum in order to improve the overall quality of the forum's content.  Such privileges are granted based on user karma level: you will be able to do the same once your karma gets high enough.