system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
Why is the Richter scale logarithmic?

I wasn't able to find a good explanation online.
gpt
This speaks to many such scales, but logarithmic scales benefit from allowing you to catalog similar events of very different magnitudes in a very compact way. There is the added bonus if there is exponential behavior in the data, logarithmic plotting gives you a linear result.