4 ms·

If you have a place to live, you shouldn't carry all your belongings with you in a backpack when you go outside. Similarly, a phone should not be your archive

by zulban 2y ago

If you have a place to live, you shouldn't carry all your belongings with you in a backpack when you go outside. Similarly, a phone should not be your archive of all your media.

tdeck 2y ago
Perhaps I can be patient and explain the underlying concepts here, since they seem to be unintuitive to a small minority of very condescending commenters: 1. I like to have access to my photos and videos while I'm on the go. You never know when the subject of some trip or experience from 2 years ago will come up in conversation, and I'll want to show a photo of it to someone I'm talking to. Since photos and videos don't weight anything inside my phone, it's no trouble to carry them. 2. I don't like to give cloud services all my photos and videos. Despite the extremely dark pattern in Google Photos where it tries multiple times a month to trick me into enabling cloud backup, I've kept it off. Some of my photos may be sensitive things like personal documents, I'd rather not have to think about what's in the cloud and what isn't, and what is deleted where. These services also often aren't free and I'd prefer not to pay for them. 3. I back up my phone regularly to my personal computer, so losing my phone doesn't mean I lose all the media on my phone. 4. And since I know someone will ask, I lock my phone. Not with a fingerprint; with a passcode. It's not perfect but I'm comfortable with the level of security.
- ryandrake 2y ago
  > Since photos and videos don't weight anything inside my phone, it's no trouble to carry them. But in your example they -do- weigh something, measured in megabytes. So there is an obvious tradeoff in terms of what you can fit on your phone with some spare empty margin, similar to physical goods that you need to fit into a backpack when you know you might pick something else up along the way.
  - kxrm 2y ago
    No, they don't "weigh" anything. Digital storage is so far removed from this concept. Let us not excuse poor business practices by trying to offload a piece of their business systems on to their customers' devices. I shouldn't have to provide space on my property to conduct business with another organization.
    - tdeck 2y ago
      To extend the already poor and tortured analogy, imagine if a paper train ticket were the size and weight of an 800 page textbook that you had to lug around, and 799 of the pages were filled with some boilerplate copied from a different company's train ticket book, that nobody ever needed to look at. But if you have a problem with the train ticket textbook, people will come out of the woodwork to tell you that you're not managing or carrying your belongings properly. I should get a bigger bag, or I should carry fewer of the books I actually want to read. Why am I carrying around so many things anyway? It's irresponsible! Sure I've got room for a piece of paper, but that's not enough these days. Don't I know that I'll need space for the train ticket textbook?
- zulban 2y ago
  If your phone's storage is at 99.994%, you can't blame that on pointless 100mb apps in 2025. Have fun with that.
kxrm 2y ago
> If you have a place to live, you shouldn't carry all your belongings with you in a backpack when you go outside. I really don't like this analogy. These are entirely different concepts. A backpack has weight, dimension in real space that impacts the real world. A phone full of videos has no extra weight or volume in the real world.
- zulban 2y ago
  Clearly, they are facing very similar physical restrictions. Not in weight but in bytes. If they want to carry many TBs on a phone in 2025 but then complaining that they can't install a 100mb app, yeah, they are carrying too much in their backpack.
  - tdeck 2y ago
    > If they want to carry many TBs on a phone in 2025 What are you talking about? Only the most expensive flagship phones have a terabyte of storage space. There are no phones that have "many TBs". Mine certainly doesn't. Regardless, none of the following functionality needs an app. It all works great on a website, and doesn't take up any space permanently on my device: - Buying a ticket - Checking transit times - Receiving notifications (not only does email exist, but websites can send notofications) - Joining a loyalty program I don't have any problem with people who want to carry these apps around, but as an infrequent user of many businesses, it's death by a thousand cuts. I resent how what were once perfectly workable mobile websites are slowly being degraded in order to force me to download hundreds of megabytes of copy-paste support libraries for what half the time are just wrapped webviews anyway.
anigbrowl 2y ago
How other people choose to use their phones is not your business.
- zulban 2y ago
  This is a public forum. If they don't want to talk about it then why are they talking about it?

by zulban 2y ago

If you have a place to live, you shouldn't carry all your belongings with you in a backpack when you go outside. Similarly, a phone should not be your archive of all your media.

tdeck 2y ago

Perhaps I can be patient and explain the underlying concepts here, since they seem to be unintuitive to a small minority of very condescending commenters: 1. I like to have access to my photos and videos while I'm on the go. You never know when the subject of some trip or experience from 2 years ago will come up in conversation, and I'll want to show a photo of it to someone I'm talking to. Since photos and videos don't weight anything inside my phone, it's no trouble to carry them. 2. I don't like to give cloud services all my photos and videos. Despite the extremely dark pattern in Google Photos where it tries multiple times a month to trick me into enabling cloud backup, I've kept it off. Some of my photos may be sensitive things like personal documents, I'd rather not have to think about what's in the cloud and what isn't, and what is deleted where. These services also often aren't free and I'd prefer not to pay for them. 3. I back up my phone regularly to my personal computer, so losing my phone doesn't mean I lose all the media on my phone. 4. And since I know someone will ask, I lock my phone. Not with a fingerprint; with a passcode. It's not perfect but I'm comfortable with the level of security.

ryandrake 2y ago
> Since photos and videos don't weight anything inside my phone, it's no trouble to carry them. But in your example they -do- weigh something, measured in megabytes. So there is an obvious tradeoff in terms of what you can fit on your phone with some spare empty margin, similar to physical goods that you need to fit into a backpack when you know you might pick something else up along the way.
- kxrm 2y ago
  No, they don't "weigh" anything. Digital storage is so far removed from this concept. Let us not excuse poor business practices by trying to offload a piece of their business systems on to their customers' devices. I shouldn't have to provide space on my property to conduct business with another organization.
  - tdeck 2y ago
    To extend the already poor and tortured analogy, imagine if a paper train ticket were the size and weight of an 800 page textbook that you had to lug around, and 799 of the pages were filled with some boilerplate copied from a different company's train ticket book, that nobody ever needed to look at. But if you have a problem with the train ticket textbook, people will come out of the woodwork to tell you that you're not managing or carrying your belongings properly. I should get a bigger bag, or I should carry fewer of the books I actually want to read. Why am I carrying around so many things anyway? It's irresponsible! Sure I've got room for a piece of paper, but that's not enough these days. Don't I know that I'll need space for the train ticket textbook?
zulban 2y ago
If your phone's storage is at 99.994%, you can't blame that on pointless 100mb apps in 2025. Have fun with that.

kxrm 2y ago

> If you have a place to live, you shouldn't carry all your belongings with you in a backpack when you go outside. I really don't like this analogy. These are entirely different concepts. A backpack has weight, dimension in real space that impacts the real world. A phone full of videos has no extra weight or volume in the real world.

zulban 2y ago
Clearly, they are facing very similar physical restrictions. Not in weight but in bytes. If they want to carry many TBs on a phone in 2025 but then complaining that they can't install a 100mb app, yeah, they are carrying too much in their backpack.
- tdeck 2y ago
  > If they want to carry many TBs on a phone in 2025 What are you talking about? Only the most expensive flagship phones have a terabyte of storage space. There are no phones that have "many TBs". Mine certainly doesn't. Regardless, none of the following functionality needs an app. It all works great on a website, and doesn't take up any space permanently on my device: - Buying a ticket - Checking transit times - Receiving notifications (not only does email exist, but websites can send notofications) - Joining a loyalty program I don't have any problem with people who want to carry these apps around, but as an infrequent user of many businesses, it's death by a thousand cuts. I resent how what were once perfectly workable mobile websites are slowly being degraded in order to force me to download hundreds of megabytes of copy-paste support libraries for what half the time are just wrapped webviews anyway.

anigbrowl 2y ago

How other people choose to use their phones is not your business.

zulban 2y ago
This is a public forum. If they don't want to talk about it then why are they talking about it?