Are you happy with it? What are its best and worst qualities?
Absolutely love it. It’s only the second Galaxy model to be sold with the Snapdragon chip in 🇦🇺 Australia, after the S22. I had an S21 Ultra (Exynos) and decided to wait for the S23, because of the rumours that the cameras would be improved.
Glad I waited, and also very glad to have an included stylus, because I’m a photographer and designer, so the stylus is bloody useful!
I honestly can’t think of an downsides to this phone, I’m so damn satisfied with it.
Which phones have you had previously? Which were the best and worst of the lot?
As noted above, I had the S21 Ultra previously. I actually bought a Pixel 7 Pro when it was released, but after about a month I decided that while it was a great phone with some clever new features, I still preferred my S21 Ultra — so I sold the Pixel 7 Pro and went back to my Samsung!
Other previous phones, let me think… First modern smartphone was the iPhone 3G, followed by iPhone 4, iPhone 5S, HTC Desire, Samsung Galaxy Nexus, Sony XPeria V, LG Nexus 5X, Google Pixel, Google Pixel 2, iPhone 11 Pro, Samsung Galaxy S10, iPhone 13 Pro, Samsung Galaxy S21 Ultra, S23 Ultra.
Not sure if that order is exactly right… haha.
How often do you upgrade to a new phone?
Usually every year, to be honest, which obviously isn’t super responsible either financially or in terms of e-waste, but it really is my number one addiction. 😂
What other Android ecosystem devices do you have? Watches, headphones/earbuds, etc.
Galaxy Watch 4, Pixel Watch, Galaxy Tab S4 (now my son’s), Galaxy Tab S6 Lite (now my daughter’s), and a Galaxy Tab S8.
Oh, and the Chromecast with Google TV.
Do you also use any Apple products, or are you Android all the way? (And/or Windows, Linux, ChromeOS, etc.)
I have an iPad Pro A12X (pre-M1, annoyingly) for drawing with Procreate, and I still have my iPhone 13 Pro — mostly just for shooting videos for work, since phone gimbals integrate better with iOS than they do with Android (or maybe just Samsung). I also have a work-supplied MacBook Pro 14" M1 Max.
Lastly, I also have a pair of AirPods Pro that I bought for my iPhone but now mostly only use with my Macbook, and a pair of Beats Fit Pro that I absolutely love using with my S23 Ultra. I was tempted by the Galaxy Buds 2 Pro, but I really prefer buds with winglets for a more secure fit.
Reddit doesn't seem to make a lot of choices or take much action in its own good interest. I moderated a 25+ million subscriber sub there for a number of years. The minimal effort the admin put in to assist was laughable. The brigading against the sub, mod harassment, chronic abusers, the mediocre tools, it was just a poor experience. Four things stand out to me:
At one point this user harassed us via modmail over and over so we got his account suspended from all of reddit for 24 hours. This prompted them to create a throwaway, mail us, claim to be law enforcement and state that he was essentially going to hunt us down. The throwaway was banned, but the original account allowed to serve out its 24 hour suspension and then just carry on. We never got an answer on why nothing happened to that account. The decisions they made were mind boggling. We had a banned user make a new account, and it took a few months to realize that it was him. It's not like the account didn't cause trouble, it's just they were previously banned for making chronically bad posts to karma farm. Just really subtle, but not egregious rule breaking. They'd been contacted numerous times to not post low effort/low quality/inappropriate stuff and after numerous attempts to correct it, with no real come back from them, we banned them. After awhile, and many many removals of their submissions, I realized this new single purpose account was them, sent it in for a ban check, confirmed, only to find out an account which had been used for no more than chronic ban evasion (it posted in no other sub) was handed a 2 week suspension and then just allowed to carry on. It was very frustrating as a mod trying to address abuse when the admin didn't really seem to care.
I found this guy spamming hundreds of subs selling fake masks during the pandemic. I had to personally write 3 bots and chase him around Reddit for weeks to eventually shut him down because the admin were so slow and so inept at dealing with him they simply couldn't do anything. This guy was operating by leaving his posts up for around 15 minutes when he posted so the mods would never get reports and ban him unless they happened to be right there when he did it. He also had dozens of accounts and kept buying more. By the time the admin would show up to ban any of his accounts he'd stopped using them for days and was through several new accounts since. It really didn't take me long to write a bot to identify his posts with 100% accuracy (except for some archive bots that some people had that copied his posts), but they couldn't do a thing to stop him
Pushshift was both the bane of our existence and the biggest tool I used. Bots obviously used it to find old posts to karma farm off of. We used it to track abusers in detail, notify other subs when we saw something up, etc. Without the ability to see deleted posts and comments we would have missed quite a bit. It was really the one tool that made moderating effective.
The horrendous block tool. Which essentially boils down to 'I want the last word and I'm going to shut this discussion down entirely, even though I'm not a mod in this sub and have no business having that kind of control over a public discussion'. The best part was users who'd block someone, wait a bit, unblock, because you have to wait to reblock, then after that time passed, make another sniping comment and then immediately reblock. The old blocking method wasn't perfect, but the new one was a mess. Someone blocking you meant that if a third party entered an on-going discussion, replied to you to discuss something, you couldn't reply to them because the thread was downstream of someone who had blocked you.
This kind of behaviour just demonstrates a site that really doesn't give a crap about its users or the community they try to build and participate in.
Manjaro. I am a guy of habits, so I never really distro-hopped, I once tried to install Arch and failed to configure everything so I tried endeavour and failed too (which would mean I am not a tech guy either ;). Ultimately, I’d say that the distribution does not matters much once you are used to it, you can always get what you want from any of them. The only thing I really like in comparison with others is pacman :)
I’m a opensuse tumbleweed user on my desktop and laptop. I also have an ubuntu home server.
I really like tumbleweed, but I have been thinking of switching to an immutable distro like guix or nix. I’ve tried guix several times and found it pretty good, but never stick with it due to its lack of KDE plasma support. Maybe I should give nix a try.
The subs I moderated have either gone dark, or are going dark in the next ciuple days.
And with that I let the mod teams I was a part of know that I am moving on. I hate what reddit did to the community, and my time feels better spent where it will be appreciated.
kbin.life
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