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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: September 30th, 2023

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  • About 6 montha ago I wanted to replace my S21 battery and checked with Samsung, who redirected me to iFixit. The only genuine Samsung S21 battery they had was only sold with the screen, which cost ~$130 or something. I didn’t need the screen…

    Last month I checked again and saw they had a third party replacement battery for ~$30, same capacity. I bought it and popped it in. It’s been working fine.

    Was it Samsung’s requirement that the battery only be sold with the screen? At the time, I would have rather had the genuine Samsung battery and would have paid a bit extra for it, but not $100 extra.






  • It’s like we’re going back to the pre-internet era but it’s obviously a little different. Before the internet, there were just a few major media providers on TV plus lots of local newspapers. I would say that, for the most part in the USA, the public trusted TV news sources even though their material interests weren’t aligned (regular people vs big media corporations). It felt like there wasn’t a reason not to trust them, since they always told an acceptable version of the truth and there wasn’t an easy way to find a different narrative (no internet or crazy cable news). Local newspapers were usually very trusted, since they were often locally owned and part of the community.

    The internet broke all of those business models. Local newspapers died because why do you need a paper when there are news websites? Major media companies were big enough to weather the storm and could buy up struggling competitors. They consolidated and one in particular started aggressively spinning the news to fit a narrative for ratings and political gain of the ownership class. Other companies followed suit.

    This, paired with the thousands of available narratives online, weakened the credibility of the major media companies. Anyone could find the other side of the story or fact check whatever was on TV.

    Now what is happening? The internet is being polluted with garbage and lies. It hasn’t been good for some time now. Obviously anyone could type up bullshit, but for a minute photos were considered reliable proof (usually). Then photoshopping something became easier and easier, which made videos the new standard of reliable proof (in most cases).

    But if anything can be fake now and difficult to identify as fake, then how can you fact check anything? Only those with the means will be able to produce undeniably real news with great difficulty, which I think will return power to major news companies or something equivalent.

    I’m probably wrong about what the future holds, so what do you think is going to happen?