This is all good info except for the gender thing. The round/long difference is just a growth habit. Watermelon plants (and other cucurbits like squash, zucchini, cantaloupe, etc) produce male and female flowers. Only the female flowers produce fruit and must be pollinated by a male flower to do so.

Nah, I'm just going to continue doing what I've always done: tapping the watermelon to hear the sound and pretend that I know what I'm doing.

This was bullshit the first 2000 times it was posted to reddit and it's still bullshit here.

Even on lemmy people still aren’t bothering to fact check things. Disappointing.

The fuck is a "male" plant ovary?

Where's the part where you slap it?

Fruit don’t have “genders,” this is complete bullshit

Morgan Freeman taught me to flick melons to determine the ripeness in Unleashed, and I have honed the skill to a masterful level. Get weird looks from strangers sometimes tho..

In my family we just slap the watermelons

I spent a season working in a packing house for watermelons. They'd come in by the crateload and we were allowed to just grab one to eat any time we wanted.

The trick I was taught, and which proved to be pretty reliable over the course of the season, was to feel the veins. (This is possibly what's being described as webbing here?) Watermelons aren't smooth, they have wide "veins" running top to bottom and you can feel them if you put your hand flat on the side of the melon. The bigger/poofier/wider the veins, the more ripe is it.