this post was submitted on 21 Mar 2025
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Asshole Design and Crappy Design

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This community covers both asshole designs and crappy designs.

Discuss manifestations of asshole designs whereby the design is deliberately anti-consumer. Manifestations of crappy designs are also welcome in this forum, which reflect poor designs that are not borne out of deliberate contempt for the consumer.

Use of these prefixes is encouraged:

[a/d] ← you are confident that the design is an Asshole Design

[c/d] ← you are confident that the design is a Crappy Design

[ObD]Obsolescence by Design (a specific variety of a/d).

Unprefixed titles are useful if you’re uncertain whether the design is deliberate.

Rules:

  1. Please avoid posting web-related designs. Instead, post those in:

Related communities

Existence Rationale:

There are other communities for Asshole Designs and Crappy Designs, but all of the communities at the time of our founding exist only on centralized instances. We are currently the sole decentralized community of this kind. (update: another crappy design forum was recently found in the free-world-- see related communities above)

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cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/19802629

Smartphones are a shit-show so I bought some old Sony Ericsson feature phones from a flea market, expecting Gammu¹ to work as reported. It worked on one phone but not others (despite all of them reportedly working with Gammu).

Some msgs arrived and got trapped on the phone, which happened to have a dysfunctional screen. And gammu failed to access the phone (though it works on some phones). So I needed to run Sony’s proprietary garbage (“PC Companion”) on a Windows machine to get the msgs.

Sony’s PC Companion is designed to phone-home. The software launches but immediately goes to the cloud to check for updates so it can update itself. So obviously offline people are inherently fucked -- they can never sync their desktop and phone without the cloud.

But worse: Sony has taken down their server. Thus rendering all Sony phone syncing software installations useless. This thread is to document the big “Fuck you” from Sony to their customers.

¹ Gammu is free software syncs to old feature phones. You can send and receive SMS using the commandline this way.

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