> disappointed that so many people thought this was a good idea
Perhaps it's more that Fulani speakers truly appreciated having an alphabetic script that is able to adequately represent the distinct sounds of their language without ambiguities, which had not been the case with the Latin or Arabic scripts. Cultural pride also would have played a factor, there's a reason South Korea has a special holiday to commemorate the creation of Hangul script: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hangul_Day
Reddit Is Fun (rif) was a well-designed app that just worked. It was fast, had a customisable user interface with defaults that didn't get in the way of enjoying the content, and could run on all of my devices easily, including an Android 7 phone from 2018. It's a shining examplar of what a mobile browsing app should be like.
By comparison, the official Reddit app feels somewhat slower, even on my relatively new Android 12 phone from 2021, having a very noticeable lag when scrolling through articles and comments. For video and photo posts, there's no way of browsing the comments without clicking on the thumbnail and having it auto-play the videos every time, meaning I need to react fast to pause the video (there is practically no way of stopping this). And it doesn't support Android 7 anymore, meaning the only way to access it from my 2018 phone is via the browser.
It baffles me why Reddit would want to cut support for 3rd party apps when they were a key component in the Reddit ecosystem.
Biggest mistake by far was letting adtech completely TANK the performance of sites just so they can satisfy paranoid adverts. It's an absolute travesty that a top 3 reason to install adblock comes from a performance POV, because these simple static webpages* are forced to inject MB's of ads into your feed first.
Reddit as a site was never optimal to begin with and it only became worse when they decided to homeroll their own image/video hosting. But the biggest consequence of surrendering to ads turns base Reddit into feel like its 20 years older than it is.
>It baffles me why Reddit would want to cut support for 3rd party apps when they were a key component in the Reddit ecosystem.
money and control, the root of most evils in the world.
Reddit devs are probably the least competent of any modern social media platform. Any talent goes to an actual site, leaving the typical "redditors" () to work for reddit.
Naturally, this leads pretty much any technical project to be doomed from inception.
I think the real problem with handwriting is the way it has been thought in school. Growing up in mid 2000s Australia, I recall it being thought largely as a rote learning exercise in which one repeats the same letters over and over again without much context, which isn't a particularly exciting thing to do. (On the other hand I quickly learned to type fast as I enjoyed playing games + writing personal documents on my computer and wanted to do all of that as quickly as possible.)
The funny thing was that some years later in 2016, I became highly interested in learning other writing systems for fun (and which I talk about on a blog of mine at [1]), which eventually also evolved into a newfound obsession with handwriting that I still practice today. Its really changed the way I see the written word and is a good way to remind oneself how letters on a screen are really the culmination of a few thousand years of scribes iterating through the older sharp, rigid and awkward letters and gradually evolving them into smoother and more fluid forms which can be drawn much faster by hand.
> Growing up in mid 2000s Australia, I recall it being thought largely as a rote learning exercise in which one repeats the same letters over and over again without much context, which isn't a particularly exciting thing to do
Growing up in 90’s and early 2000’s Slovenia, this sounds strange to me. Yes we learned handwriting by rote repetition of letters in the first few months of first grade. But then we started writing real things.
Even in college we were still expected to write essay answers on a piece of paper by hand. In high school we wrote entire essays – up to 1500 words – by hand at school for our literature exams. All our notes in class were handwritten at every level of schooling.
Laptops started becoming a thing in college and most people quickly realized digital note-taking is far too clunky. You need the expressiveness and speed of handwriting to truly capture an idea.
Hell even today I always have a notebook next to my keyboard when I work. The seamless transition between writing, drawing, and scribbling is unparalleled.
> Growing up in 90’s and early 2000’s Slovenia, this sounds strange to me
Perhaps my memory of primary school's a bit fuzzy in this regard, but the point I intended to make was that handwriting was an unpleasant but necessary thing I had to do to get through school and was not something I particularly enjoyed for this reason. The English literature exams were always the worst because of all the darn essays I had to write by hand. On the other hand, me and my cohort got free school laptops from the Australian government in Year 9 [0] which were great for note-taking in class and took the pressure off the need to rely on my at-the-time mediocre and slow handwriting. While having some significant restrictions including the blocking of external programs and an Internet filter that blocked Facebook, many of us enjoyed hacking these laptops to make it run games or other programs we were not supposed to run, lol. Also we got to get them unlocked and keep them after graduating high school.
These days I see much greater value in having good handwriting, and as others have said around, handwritten notes actually help with memory recall far greater than a typed note ever will. Typed notes still have their place as they can be searched much more quickly than handwritten notes, but I found that handwritten notes are much better for notetaking important and critical procedures (e.g. on-call incident response) so that they can be remembered better. Always good to have not just 1 notetaking option, for sure.
Google's Noto project has a decent sans-serif Mongolian script typeface (https://www.google.com/get/noto/#sans-mong) that is pre-installed on newer Android and iOS devices.
Chinese characters (hanzi) are not an 'archaic writing system'. While hanzi allows for the expression of meaning in addition to pronunciation, which is unique amongst the other writing systems of the world, they are also more phonetic than is commonly perceived.
The majority of Chinese characters (more than 80%) are 'phono-semantic compounds' where 1 part of the character indicates the meaning and the other indicates the pronunciation. And the majority of these compounds follow a surprisingly regular pattern: for instance, the character '召' is pronounced 'zhao' in Mandarin Chinese, and forms the right side of the characters '招' and '昭' - both of which are also pronounced 'zhao'.
Here's another example - the character '包' is pronounced 'bao', and is frequently found as a component in characters pronounced 'bao': '饱' ('full stomach', with the food radical ⻠ on the left) and '抱' ('hug', with the hand radical ⺘). '包' also forms the phonetic component of some characters pronounced as 'pao', which sounds similar to 'bao': '跑' ('run', with the foot radical ⻊), '炮' ('cannon', with the fire radical 火), and '泡' ('bubble', with the water radical ⺡). I had been studying Chinese recently, and understanding the phonetic aspects of the characters has helped me to read them more easily than before.
Having said that, a lot of these phonetic relations date back many years and some of them have been obscured due to language change. But to blindly assume that Chinese characters are 'archaic' is false - as others have commented, you can say the same for English spelling, which also has spellings that date back many years but do not make sense today, like the 'gh' in 'tough', 'dough' and 'caught'. Also, it would be possible to reform Chinese characters such that every character with the same pronunciation would use the same phonetic component, while allowing for additional components to indicate the meaning. And that was what Simplified Chinese did to a certain extent.
Thanks for the detailed response, 'archaic' is not necessarily the best word to describe the problems with it, and hanzi seems to be more straightforward than Kanji
But dealing with a huge alphabet is more complicated than one with (much) fewer characters as the Latin, Arabic and Korean ones.
The English spelling problem is annoying, but most languages don't have such a disparity in writing (which, for the most part, is not that big).
Perhaps it's more that Fulani speakers truly appreciated having an alphabetic script that is able to adequately represent the distinct sounds of their language without ambiguities, which had not been the case with the Latin or Arabic scripts. Cultural pride also would have played a factor, there's a reason South Korea has a special holiday to commemorate the creation of Hangul script: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hangul_Day