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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 27th, 2023

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  • TLDR: Long rant about modern smart phones.

    I’ve concluded that it is impossible to get a new phone that has the features I want. Some phone manufacturer always seems to arbitrarily declare useful features/form factors obsolete, maybe replaces it with some new gimmick and gets the hype machine going so all the other manufacturers do the same in fear of becoming irrelevant.

    I just wish that some day some company is going to create a smart phone with a reliable fingerprint reader on the back again where it is reachable by fingers on BOTH the left and right hand. Or that some manufacturer will create a phone with a smaller screen than 6 inches. Or god forbid a normal aspect ratio like 16:9 instead of the ridiculously long lightsabers they’re making now. Then maybe it would be possible to get it out of my pocket while sitting down. Missing headphone jack is just a drop in the ocean IMO. There are so many other annoyances that I didn’t use to have, but now is an issue with modern smart phones.

    If I got the chance to dictate what the manufacturers should do. I would tell them to stop. The camera is good enough. Make it smaller and not protruding out the back of the phone so much. The SOC is fast enough. Make it more power efficient instead of chasing for the next GHz. The screen is large enough, just stop. If I wanted a larger screen I would use a tablet. Do some damn QA. Test the main functionality of a phone, which is communication, not game benchmarks, not who can take the prettiest picture of the moon. Is it possible to take the phone out of the pocket without accidentally hanging up on whoever is calling you? Is it possible to send and receive to/from SMS/MMS groups? Does the fingerprint reader actually work or does it just say “sorry too many tries” every time you take the phone out of the pocket before even touching the fingerprint reader?

    Just had to get that out of my system :P








  • I think this is a problem of the capitalist system the ad-based websites exist in. There is an expectation for continuous growth, and if showing ads is the main source of income, the only way to grow after a certain point (user base not growing a lot any more) is to be more and more intrusive to shove more and more ads in the users faces. At some point we’re fed up with the ads to the point it is not worth visiting the site anymore.

    If growth weren’t expected we could have stopped at a reasonable level of ads that are not as intrusive and had a steady income to cover the cost of running the site as long as the users are satisfied. But unfortunately everything anyone wants to use the internet for these days becomes a get rich quick scheme, causing the eventual enshittification of most sites.

    This is why I like self hosted services, community funded, non profits, etc. For example wikipedia, and beehaw 🙂. It feels good donating when I can trust that the site owners have good intentions. It does not feel good to pay a subscription to a mega-corporation to avoid ads.