We used to have earbuds that don’t need to be charged because they had a headphone jack, didn’t get lost so easily because they had a cord attached to a headphone jack, never lost the bluetooth connection because they had a headphone jack, and they cost less because they had a headphone jack. https://bsky.app/profile/daisyfm.bsky.social/post/3l3mfjc6sn62k
or the battery is dead…
It’s higher and higher probability you won’t have a headphone available when you need to take a call. So people will start taking speaker phone calls. They don’t have a choice.
Just like in game design, you remove friction from the things you want to encourage, you add friction to the things you want to discourage. Right now we are encouraging people to use speakerphone in public.
Or they could, ya know, put the phone to their goddamn ear like a rational person. I don’t buy that speakerphone is their ONLY choice, especially on public transit.
In the bad old days when everybody had headphone jacks, I could keep a bunch of $1 headphones in their original wrappers, in my bag. And if somebody was misbehaving on public transit I could just hand them a brand new pair of headphones. And 90% of the time they’d look embarrassed and then use them.
I don’t have that option now, and even if I did, they’d spend like 7 minutes trying to pair the damn things and then charge them. It’s not equitable
Not sure how that addresses the option of putting your phone to your ear for a phone call. All phones still have a non-speaker phone call option.
People shouldn’t need to be publicly shamed into acting right.
Video call, YouTube video, music video. You can’t watch it with the phone up to your head
People, as with all the things, need a constant feedback loop to stay within acceptable balance. Because acceptance is the feedback loop. If you never teach a child how to behave in public, they will behave poorly in public. The feedback loop is critical
I’ll give you youtube videos, but nobody NEEDS to watch YouTube so everyone around them is subject to it.
If you need a constant feedback loop to remember how to behave then you’re weak and won’t survive the winter.
I don’t know what to tell you: humans as they are, are not humans as you would like them to be. But we have to deal with them as they are.
Designing phones for low friction headphone use make public spaces nicer to be in.
Designing phones to sell earbuds creates more profit, but public spaces are worse to be in.
That’s my takeaway