It also wasn’t common but there was a Samsung Folder which was a flip phone and a Motorola Flipout which was a swivel phone. My point is, you could buy all kinds of wacky devices.

Check out Sidephone.

HTC Desire Z had swinging action which was pretty slick. Grit couldn’t get stuck in those sliders and it snapped open with a satisfying clack.

A QWERTY flip phone would actually be sweet. Are there any examples from history, from the era when phones were fun?

It’s amazing how homogenized phones became: Apple or Google flavoured slabs with a 6" or 6.5" display. That’s starting to change with foldable displays and it looks like 2026 might be a comeback year for hardware keyboards, so I’m optimistic about mobile devices being more than just social media consumption machines.

Fifteen years ago you could get portrait sliders and landscape sliders and flip phones and BlackBerry style phones and phones that had game controls, and 4" slabs and 6" slabs (called “phablets” back then). There was so much more choice and it was so much more fun. Five years ago you couldn’t even get a modern phone that’s less than 6" so it fits easily in your pocket.

I loved my Passport but the Titan 2 just looked frumpy in a way that the Passport didn’t. It’s not looks that keeps me from buying it though; it’s the complete lack of security updates which would prevent me from using it for work. Unihertz has promised better support starting with Titan 2. If that turns out to be true, then the upcoming Titan Elite will be an attractive competitor to the Clicks Communicator, which has promised 5 years of security updates.

By “inadequate” I don’t mean having room for improvement. I mean: lacking, weak, light-handed. By that definition, SO’s moderation is if anything, overdone, not inadequate. Personally, I love it as a technical resource, even if contributions are difficult to make in line with moderation policies.

I’m just using it as an example of what a Q&A site with inadequate moderation looks like. If you can’t see that then I don’t think we’re going to see eye to eye no matter how long this discussion continues.

Of course there’s a middle ground, that’s much closer in my ideal world to StackOverflow than it is to Yahoo Answers or Quora.

Lemmy isn’t a Q&A application in the way that the others I mentioned are.

If Stack Overflow is a 3/10 then Quora is a 1/10 and Yahoo Answers is -5/10.

If the alternative is the cesspit that is Yahoo Answers and Quora, I’ll take the heavy-handed moderation of StackOverflow.