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Every time people use costs I really wonder what’s going on. My wife still uses an iPhone 13 and life for her is not particularly different from my iPhone 16. Y

by arjie 25d ago

Every time people use costs I really wonder what’s going on. My wife still uses an iPhone 13 and life for her is not particularly different from my iPhone 16. You don’t have to do any of this stuff: > I have to service and finance a £600 phone, pay a monthly contract and subscription to Apple, I then have to install an adblocker because otherwise sites are just unusable No one is going to connect you to a network from wherever you are for free. Sure that’s true. You have to go to a library or public service if you want that. But also all these things are entirely optional. One of my bank accounts was locked out of online use because of something or the other and I just used it as my debit card and went in to the branch to withdraw money. I much preferred my other accounts where I could also use online stuff and when I finally got around to solving it it was only 30 min with one of those branch managers. But I learned that it’s not really that bad to be cut off from online services. It pretty gracefully degrades to just being a banking service like the 2000s. I haven’t lived in the UK for a decade so it would be a pain for me from here in the US to do so with my HSBC account but all local banking is fine and I could probably continue to use my debit card. This entire genre of rant is popular on social media like HN these days and I really don’t get it. Everything is awesome. The Internet is blazing fast and has 1000x the content it used to and it’s all incredibly well indexed and available via LLMs and search. This feels very rose-tinted about the past.

derbOac 25d ago
I've noticed my bank — a large well-known bank — has been closing a large number of physical locations and encouraging people to bank with their app. The app is convenient but this post points out the downside, that your money flow is now controlled by the app and the phone it is on. The bank in turn makes your access to your money contingent on you using a phone it requires. Sure you can still go into a physical location but now instead of having two nearby locations I have to travel 1.5 times as far to the one location left near me. A pattern I've noticed is that the physical world had the benefit of necessitating competition and distributed offerings by virtue of space and geography itself. The internet allows people to sidestep space, centralizing everything in that "internet space" and controlling access to the space. It shrinks the space in a lot of ways ironically, rather than expanding it. Things could be different — for example, the hospitals could be saving your data on open records systems that they locally control using a standard protocol, akin to yesteryear. But they don't. They've closed their local records system and now hand it over to a private centralized EHR somewhere else that everyone uses. Sure, a lot of things are better. But some things are worse, and worse in a way that surrounds certain fundamentals of functioning.
- pjc50 25d ago
  We think of "frictionless" as good, but the friction was the only thing preventing services from consolidating to a single point. Of control and failure.
jesucresta 25d ago
Are you kind of implying that you can have a bank account without internet access in 2026? Extremely disingenuous
- ThrowawayTestr 25d ago
  They're inconvenient but physical banks still exist
- monomial 25d ago
  How so? I have 1 bank account with a local credit union and I have never logged into any of the online stuff. What do you take issue with, specifically?
- icedchai 25d ago
  You certainly can. My parents don't use online banking or even ATMs.
folkrav 25d ago
I wouldn't disagree if in-person service was even comparable, but nowadays, for the banks available to me in the area, opening hours are even worse than they were in the 00s, there are way less branches still opened than there used to, and there's barely any staff, most are just a room with a branded ATM. I wouldn't call it gracefully degrading so much as them keeping minimal service (legal reasons, maybe, I don't know).
mexicocitinluez 25d ago
> I then have to install an adblocker because otherwise sites are just unusable I've been raw-dogging the internet for years now and have had very little issues. Sure, some sites have ads. But if they don't generate revenue from those ads, then I'd expect those sites to no longer exist. It's a level of entitlement that's insane to me. If someone is hosting their own blog and use ads to help offset that, why should I be able to get their content for free AND cost them money for the traffic? People consistenty act like they have no agency.
- dingaling 25d ago
  " If someone is hosting their own blog and use ads to help offset that..." It used to be that hosting your own blog was a hobby, not a cost-neutral or revenue-positive venture. Like any hobby, you did it for your own enjoyment and if other people enjoyed it, too, then that was a benefit and maybe you'd made the Word a little better. So if you're not willing to pay a few pence per day to cover the cost of your hobby out of your own pocket, then the answer is "stop blogging" rather than "I shall inflict ads on those who dare to view my output".
  - mexicocitinluez 25d ago
    > So if you're not willing to pay a few pence per day to cover the cost of your hobby out of your own pocket, then the answer is "stop blogging" rather than "I shall inflict ads on those who dare to view my output". lol This is a wild sentiment to not only have, but to share with others. Just in shock someone actually believe this. That you're so entitled to other people's stuff that unless they give it to you for free they shouldn't be doing it. > It used to be that hosting your own blog was a hobby, not a cost-neutral or revenue-positive venture. lol What? You're just making things up.
    - deleted 24d ago
      [deleted]
- mancerayder 25d ago
  >It's a level of entitlement that's insane to me. If someone is hosting their own blog and use ads to help offset that, why should I be able to get their content for free AND cost them money for the traffic? It's not necessarily entitlement for everyone - from a cognitive point of view, some people find it stressful or painful to maintain concentration on written paragraphs when there's flashing, bouncing, colorful stuff just an inch over on the side. What about a video that jumps over the text with a tiny X that I need to concentrate just to find (the X has no border, either). I'll tolerate ads in a newspaper. But not like this.

by arjie 25d ago

derbOac 25d ago

I've noticed my bank — a large well-known bank — has been closing a large number of physical locations and encouraging people to bank with their app. The app is convenient but this post points out the downside, that your money flow is now controlled by the app and the phone it is on. The bank in turn makes your access to your money contingent on you using a phone it requires. Sure you can still go into a physical location but now instead of having two nearby locations I have to travel 1.5 times as far to the one location left near me. A pattern I've noticed is that the physical world had the benefit of necessitating competition and distributed offerings by virtue of space and geography itself. The internet allows people to sidestep space, centralizing everything in that "internet space" and controlling access to the space. It shrinks the space in a lot of ways ironically, rather than expanding it. Things could be different — for example, the hospitals could be saving your data on open records systems that they locally control using a standard protocol, akin to yesteryear. But they don't. They've closed their local records system and now hand it over to a private centralized EHR somewhere else that everyone uses. Sure, a lot of things are better. But some things are worse, and worse in a way that surrounds certain fundamentals of functioning.

pjc50 25d ago
We think of "frictionless" as good, but the friction was the only thing preventing services from consolidating to a single point. Of control and failure.

jesucresta 25d ago

Are you kind of implying that you can have a bank account without internet access in 2026? Extremely disingenuous

ThrowawayTestr 25d ago
They're inconvenient but physical banks still exist
monomial 25d ago
How so? I have 1 bank account with a local credit union and I have never logged into any of the online stuff. What do you take issue with, specifically?
icedchai 25d ago
You certainly can. My parents don't use online banking or even ATMs.

folkrav 25d ago

I wouldn't disagree if in-person service was even comparable, but nowadays, for the banks available to me in the area, opening hours are even worse than they were in the 00s, there are way less branches still opened than there used to, and there's barely any staff, most are just a room with a branded ATM. I wouldn't call it gracefully degrading so much as them keeping minimal service (legal reasons, maybe, I don't know).

mexicocitinluez 25d ago

> I then have to install an adblocker because otherwise sites are just unusable I've been raw-dogging the internet for years now and have had very little issues. Sure, some sites have ads. But if they don't generate revenue from those ads, then I'd expect those sites to no longer exist. It's a level of entitlement that's insane to me. If someone is hosting their own blog and use ads to help offset that, why should I be able to get their content for free AND cost them money for the traffic? People consistenty act like they have no agency.

dingaling 25d ago
" If someone is hosting their own blog and use ads to help offset that..." It used to be that hosting your own blog was a hobby, not a cost-neutral or revenue-positive venture. Like any hobby, you did it for your own enjoyment and if other people enjoyed it, too, then that was a benefit and maybe you'd made the Word a little better. So if you're not willing to pay a few pence per day to cover the cost of your hobby out of your own pocket, then the answer is "stop blogging" rather than "I shall inflict ads on those who dare to view my output".
- mexicocitinluez 25d ago
  > So if you're not willing to pay a few pence per day to cover the cost of your hobby out of your own pocket, then the answer is "stop blogging" rather than "I shall inflict ads on those who dare to view my output". lol This is a wild sentiment to not only have, but to share with others. Just in shock someone actually believe this. That you're so entitled to other people's stuff that unless they give it to you for free they shouldn't be doing it. > It used to be that hosting your own blog was a hobby, not a cost-neutral or revenue-positive venture. lol What? You're just making things up.
  - deleted 24d ago
    [deleted]
mancerayder 25d ago
>It's a level of entitlement that's insane to me. If someone is hosting their own blog and use ads to help offset that, why should I be able to get their content for free AND cost them money for the traffic? It's not necessarily entitlement for everyone - from a cognitive point of view, some people find it stressful or painful to maintain concentration on written paragraphs when there's flashing, bouncing, colorful stuff just an inch over on the side. What about a video that jumps over the text with a tiny X that I need to concentrate just to find (the X has no border, either). I'll tolerate ads in a newspaper. But not like this.