I feel like a boomer in my 20s with the fact that I fucking despise having to pay 30-40 dollars a month just so some guy from work can reach me and tell me I need to work extra hours. Everything and everyone else I can contact online using my work's PC or my personal laptop. It's also dogshit-garbage because it's getting to the point where most services entirely give up on their desktop/browser ports or websites because they just assume people are going to use their phone.

Instagram was like this for a long while. Indeed recently removed their "distance" feature and other filter features from their desktop version. Reddit is another example. Enshittification of the internet to put it all on a phone is awful.

  • amemorablename@lemmygrad.ml
    ·
    22 hours ago

    I like phones. But mini-handheld-computers, I'm not a fan of. I'm being a bit tongue in cheek putting it that way, but point is, where phones went wrong in my view is when they became about being basically everything else other than a phone (and of course, capitalism played a big part in why that went so wrong).

    The irony is, cordless phones (including the older fliphones and now "smart"phones) are actually worse at phone calls. I remember, and have talked to someone older before who remembers probably better than I do, how corded phones had significantly better phone call clarity. Now it feels like I have to use bluetooth headphones to get anything close to the clarity of an old corded phone, though it's probably more like the quality of an old cordless phone at that point (the kind that still had a good speaker close to your ear).

    This isn't the only area where "technological advancement" has actually lead to worse quality. IIRC, for example, audio on platforms such as youtube tends to be worse than what you'd find on a CD which is worse than what you'd find on a good record. I don't know if this is still as true for the highest quality video upload/settings and if someone knows better, feel free to correct me. But I remember reading/hearing about it at some point.

    Anyway, I digress. I also wanted to mention how one of the problems with "smart"phones is that they are much more obfuscated in design than PCs are. Even if you want to be technologically literate with them, it's actually hard to do so, compared to a PC. Filesystems are opaque and much of what you interact with is some surface level settings you're allowed to change and a bunch of apps that are doing god knows what with your personal info. There was a dark humor kind of quote about this I read in passing, went something like: "We raised exactly one generation of people who are literate in computers." The generation that grew up with computers, quite a few gained some significant literacy in computers and end up helping the older generations that didn't. The generation that is growing up with smartphones, they are... I guess literate in particular apps? But it's more of a challenge for them to organically become literate with computers in the same way. This isn't to say it's a binary generational thing or that a quote like that is entirely factually accurate across the board, but it kind of gets at one of the problems with how "phones" have taken over.