For those wondering like I was, mousewheels typically use optical or magnetic rotary encoders. However some do actually use potentiometers. I'm pretty sure the one pictured is an encoder though; all of the potentiometer based mousewheels I can find are way more bulky than that.
Edit: Damn it Lemmy. Fix your sorting so I'm not accidentally commenting on 4 day old posts.
I agree. Never understood why it was seen as a bad thing to respond to older comments or posts. Especially if you have something useful or good to contribute like the person above did.
On message boards it would bump old threads to top, which can be annoying. On reddit it was generally more ok, but many still had the idea that after some amount of time the discussion is "done". Lemmy has been pretty great in that regard.
I think it might be as well, that Lemmy doesn't have the ammount of content other sites have. So people like me discovering a new channel can actually scroll a lot further into the past without realizing that you've run into posts that are a year old.
I’ve never seen that and that seems wildly stupid as a mechanism. Far too flawed in comparison to an optical wheel and sensor, and it’s not like the optical sensor is expensive,