MargotRobbie

Well, we've sure had a doozy of a week here on the newly reopened [email protected].

This post is designed to have everyone on the same page for the operation of the community, as well as to address any feedbacks or concerns which you may have. Our goal is to make sure everybody's voice is heard.

Everything is up for discussion, feel free to give your thoughts on the current state of the community here.

Instead of being on a set schedule, this post will be updated whenever our moderation team feels like there's enough of a need to start a new one. Hence, irregularly updated.

So. let's get started:

1. We are looking for new mods.

As this is a technical community, the amount of rule breaking comments and posts we have to remove right now has been pretty low. So, the primary responsibility of mods is currently to engage with the rest of the community and actively host discussion threads.

I'd say we would want at least two more moderator for now. Mods should be knowledgeable and helpful and should serve as an example to the rest of the community.

2. Instance and community partners.

With the admin's permission, we have decided that partnership with different communities will be needed for to help each other.

Please contact our moderators to see if we can have your communities linked on our side bar, but no further promotion will be allowed from any of us, and moderators have the discretion to remove advertisement under Rule 3.

3. Mod philosophies: Overall

I like to keep the atmosphere here casual yet passionately helpful, so, rules will be interpreted with a consideration for people first and foremost, as it's the spirit of the rules that matter more than the letter. (But I'm usually a big softy on the rules.)

However, we also have a zero-tolerance policy for hate. Rule 5 will be liberally applied from our moderator team as seen fit to prevent toxic internet arguments. Please be your best self here and don't make any of our lives more difficult.

4. Mod philosophies: No AMAs

The main topic we want to talk about here is Android, instead of having people doing self-promotions. If you had an interesting experience or topic about Android you would like to share, please describe it in a regular post instead.

AMAs are strongly discouraged, and it'll be unlikely that our mod team would want to host any here for the time being.

5. Mod philosophies: No megathreads.

They just stifle discussion more than anything else. The Lemmy default "Active" algorithm is better than reddit's default, so I don't see a need for them. So, no megathreads for now.

6. Low quality comments

OK, for example, please don't do the subreddit as hashtag thing here. Leave that behind at reddit. Please.

7. Optional Submission Statements

We're going to encourage posters to leave an optional submission statement on their own thoughts on the article before submission (not just a summary or a copypaste of the article), in case the headline doesn't explain enough.

Please don't submit anything that you haven't read yet. It's lazy, and not behavior we would want to encourage here.

8. Any other questions or concerns you want to cover for the current rule set.

As announced in our re-opening post, we will be conducting a community icon/banner contest this weekend.

Rules:

1. Top level comments must include either an icon and or banner design, or both.
2. The contest will run until Monday morning. The icon/banner with the highest upvote count (within reason, of course) wins.
3. The icon design must be a square image with or without transparency, preferably 256x256, but other sizes are fine, provided that they are reasonable.
4. We recommend a banner design of 1280x400, but it should be able to go a bit taller, we'll just see how the winning design looks on the site and adjust accordingly.
5. You are allowed to discuss your design in the comments, but you are not allowed to engage in unethical vote manipulation. (Bots and such)
6. AI generated art is allowed, but please also include your prompt settings if the whole or a significant portion of the image is generated.
7. We'll change the design and run another contest whenever we collectively decides that we are bored with the current ones.

Make them interesting, and have fun.

UPDATE:

At 6 upvotes total, @AlmightySnoo has won the icon contest and will have their design be used for our community until we get bored of it. Congratulations!

Since there is no banner submission, we will not change out our existing banner this time.

Hold on tight, we are almost back...

Previously on Lemmy: Sony

Past Discussions:

• OnePlus
• Motorola

I thought we should restart the brand discussion with something more popular to give this community relaunch a bit more oomph. So, Samsung it is.

I've never really used a Samsung phone much before, despite them being so popular in the States. Have friends who used them, they usually look nice and high quality, and the Galaxy S Active are the only high-end phones I know that doesn't shatter when you look at them wrong without a case, so, props to Samsung.

There are may reasons I don't like Samsung phones: Hardware fuse disabling Knox on bootloader unlock, Exynos vs Snapdragon models, the mandatory Bixby button, the Galaxy Note 7 that really blew up. To me, Samsung phones are trying so hard to go against what makes Android good, which is the customizability to do whatever you wanted. Android is everything; Samsung is just Samsung.

Personally, I think Samsung is only worth buying at the very high end for the Galaxy S series. I've heard that A series have gotten better, but there always seems to be better choices from Moto/Pixel/Chinese brands on Amazon that it's not worth considering their low tier offering.

What should we do next week? I'm thinking Microsoft, just to make fun of them for the very idea of making a Surface Duo 2.

FAQ:

Lemmy is a place for people to have thoughtful conversations as well as dumb fun, and having bot comments severely impacts this experience. Therefore, for c/android, we would like to only use the minimum number of bots only as needed by the community.

Here is a list of bots that are allowed (to comment) in this community. Bots aren't allowed to create posts. If you do not see your bot in this list and it's not a new one, then that means we consider it to be malicious and don't want it here.

To have your helpful bot included in this list, please contact our moderators for a review.

The Whitelist

Previously on Lemmy: OnePlus

Past Discussions:

• Motorola

As promised, @[email protected].

I personally don't have much experience with Sony Ericsson phones. To me, all Sony electronics (outside of the PlayStations) are always just good, but also always at a price premium, and there is usually better value to be found with another brand. (I will concede that many of their recent products, however, actually feels like they are the best in class again.)

Sony phones are no exception to the rule. I've only seen one Sony phone out in the wild (outside of the Persona 5 anime, where apparently every phone is made by Sony). It was good, had everything I wanted on a phone, but nothing really stands out about it outside of its small size. You would think the company that supplies everyone's camera sensors and makes the best mirrorless camera would, by logic, have the best camera phones as well, but again, nothing about them really stands out.

In conclusion, always good, never exceptional.

Also, last 2 cents, I just can't take the name "Xperia One II" seriously.

Previously on Lemmy: Motorola

Maybe we should just make this a series now.

Never settle for Oneplus.

I've always felt that Oneplus is a brand that I should like on principle of having clean software with barebones but powerful hardware, but in reality, every single Oneplus phone I've seen always had some sort of big BUTs attached to them, so buying Oneplus always feels like settling.

Take the Oneplus One for example, that sandstone textured cover was THE most creative material I felt a phone could have had, and I'm honestly shocked nobody has ever done it again. But along with that of course, comes with the cringy "smash your phone" marketing campaign, the half-hearted attempt to distance themselves from their parent company Oppo, the whole software mess with CyanogenMod/OxygenOS, etc.

Had a Oneplus 3T for a while, same deal: Great phone when it works as intended, but they raised their price without making the phone better, and the inexplicable random restarts/battery drain is so irritating, never had another phone that does that.

Recently they've dropped all pretense of not being Oppo and abandoned their core audience, choosing to have the "courage" to drop the headphone jack. Mediocre Chinese phones with flagship specs are a dime a dozen, I just don't see a reason to buy them anymore.

I have one of the Moto Edges, can't say I have many complaints outside of the slow charging and a dead pixel that developed a year in.

The edges didn't bother me as much as I thought it would, I can even use it as trigger to play Citra games which I couldn't do with a flat phone so that was nifty. Clean software, long battery life, but terrible update schedule though.