Are these the same safety standards that cause apple predictive text to refuse to recognise the cuss words I a grown adult use and have to go back and fix over and over again. Ducking stupid if you ask me.
> Tumblr says that child pornography was the reason for its app’s sudden disappearance from the iOS App Store. The app has been missing from the store since November 16th, but until now the reason for its absence was unclear — initially Tumblr simply said it was “working to resolve the issue with the iOS app.” However, after Download.com approached Tumblr with sources claiming that the reason was related to the discovery of child pornography on the service, the Yahoo-owned social media network issued a new statement confirming the matter. [0]
Why does tumblr need an app in the first place? Make it a website that is mobile friendly, and then Apple has no say. Oh, wait, you want to hoover up all of that user data to do what you want with it instead? Which fight are you actually fighting then?
Safari works amazingly for small websites, but for websites with infinite scrolling like Tumblr and Twitter, it becomes unbearably slow after the first hundred or so posts. Historically, Safari is slow to adopt new web features, and it STILL doesn't have web push notifications (and more).
You can run these same websites on Android Chrome just fine, even on a lower-powered Android phone. I'm not sure if they're using APIs that need to be polyfilled on Safari, or if Safari is just trash.
At this time, I'm convinced that if Apple allowed other browser engines on the App Store, this would not be a problem at all, not that I can test it out anyways.
I can’t speak on Tumblr, but the issue is even worse than “unbearably slow” on Twitter.
Once I’m down about 50ish posts on my feed, hitting back from a post to get back to the feed seems to have around a 25% chance to quickly throw a “Safari has detected a problem” error and force a refresh - sending me back to the top of the feed. And this is on an iPhone 12 Pro Max so it’s not like the hardware is out of date.
I primarily blame Safari, but on some level I think Twitter is aware of the problem and has no intentions of fixing it. The mobile Twitter site is purposely designed to make it nearly impossible to open a tweet in a background tab if it doesn’t have an image (the browser tries to select text on a long press). That’s clearly something Twitter could fix if they wanted to.
Twitter's mobile problem isn't specific to Safari. The initial load of any tweet on my Android Firefox is ~20 seconds. Every subsequent action takes at least a full second. Couple that with the huge "it's better on the app" banners you get every time you try to do anything, and it's obvious that Twitter is intentionally neglecting mobile web.
(I've got an oldish phone, but it performs fine on every website I ever visit except Twitter.)
I think all the 'social media' platforms really want you to install their software onto your device anyway. I suspect they could make it work in the browser if that made sense for their business, but they would rather be on your home screen.
Good. These features need to be supported by browsers for an extremely long time and Google is trying to force garbage under the guise of "standards." I hope Apple continues to fight against the ridiculous power hungry feature creep.
I don't build websites with infinite scroll or enough data that would justify it nor attract enough visitors to punish a t2.micro, so I have no first hand experience with any of that.
However, curiosity requires that I ask what/how/why does any of that affect mobile-first web deployment in away that it is not addressed when a large chunk of that mobile use is broken? If you program yourself into a dead end, back up and take another turn.
Oh, it is easier in a mobile native where you get the benefit of hoovering up personal data on all of your users? Gee, let's not expend effort to make something work universally, let's instead take the easy route and make money on the side too. The fact that losing this large share of users because of one type of content is not enough of a decision to go the other route shows just how much money there is in the hoovering of data.
If I understand what you're trying to say correctly, I need to say that I'm speaking fully from a user experience standpoint as an end user. I am not a Tumblr engineer. Anecdotally, out of the few people I know that still use Tumblr, they use desktop and mobile Chrome to access the website. I don't have any statistics on how many people use the apps.
So, to me, Tumblr's website is already the main point of access, and these performance problems don't exist on Firefox or Chrome. I'm not talking about server-side response times, I'm talking about the time to render posts on the client. I find that a lot of times, after scrolling, you have to wait a few seconds before you see anything but the blue background that Tumblr has.
So, no, I'm going to pin it on Safari if (even) Firefox can deal with it.
This is the second time you've said it's about "hoovering up data".
Yahoo runs one of the biggest ad networks in the world, and you need to register to use Tumblr. They as already have everything they need to track you right there.
A mobile app in many circumstances reduces the data tracking (see this whole discussion about how effective Apple's do not track is because of their monopoly powers).
Just because Apple made it harder doesn't mean they made it impossible. There's a reason so many places work on making apps for multiple platforms (at least 2) rather than a unified web experience. There are benefits beyond serving a webpage in a native app, and they all want those benefits. Stick your head in the sand and deny it all you want, but it still happens.
> Safari works amazingly for small websites, but for websites with infinite scrolling like Tumblr and Twitter, it becomes unbearably slow after the first hundred or so posts.
That's absolutely not true, even if the web developer implements this in the Dumbest Possible Way. Please point me to an example page and prove me wrong.
On M1 Max with Safari 15.5, it took me about 40 seconds of fast scrolling to get it to start stuttering occasionally. Then, another 30 seconds to get it to start blanking out for a second at a time. And finally, another 30 seconds to get it to start taking seconds to render. I won't give the number of posts before it started lagging because I don't know the exact number.
On my phone (iPhone 13 Pro Max, albeit on the iOS 16 beta), it takes Safari about 15 seconds of scrolling before the scrolling drops to around 40fps from what looked close to 120fps. Then, another 20 seconds to start seeing things rendering halfway before jumping around and then rendering the correct post. This isn't necessarily a fair comparison due to the usage of beta software, but even on an M1 on production OS software it doesn't seem to be much better. Chrome 102 on macOS handles the exact thing that I did without any problem at all.
It's especially bad when you have a lot of videos on your dashboard. If you only have image posts, it might take a bit longer to start stuttering.
This has been the case for years, so it's nothing new. I remember this being a problem almost a decade ago, on an 4th generation iPad with the A6X SoC. Things have improved since then for sure, but those it's probably mostly hardware improvements that's helping.
I'll accept blaming Twitter's horrible performance on its use of React Native Web, but not Tumblr.
I have to give you credit for going this far into proving whatever we're trying to prove. However, who the hell in the real world infinite scroll this much? Some people do things that would make any QA team more valuable, and you're starting to sound like someone I'd love to have on any QA team I'd work along side.
This really sounds like one of those issues a dedicated person finds where the devs look at it and say no reasonable user would ever do this. The issue if not closed as "won't fix" gets deprioritized so low that it never gets looked at again. Even as a dev, I'd not have the patience to recreate the problem. It's just such an outside edge case from expected behavior/usage that I don't even know what to say in response.
You're correct. Any website that has so much worthless content that it all gets scrolled passed that quickly without catching my attention to read further is not going to a site I visit regularly after that initial visit.
I honestly worry for people that do. There's something sad to me about people that do.
> if Apple allowed other browser engines on the App Store
You mean Gecko or Blink? WebKit is really not the problem. Web Developers' strict compliance to only make sure their site works on Windows may be part of it.
Unfortunately Firefox on iPhone uses Safari under the hood. Apple doesn't allow any 3rd party browser engines on their mobile devices. It's 100% Safari. Chrome and Firefox can be thought of as UI reskins.
Anybody can make apps. It's just that if you choose to make an app for platformX, then you have to play by platformX's rules. If you make a website, then you can make the website however the F** you want, and people on platformX can still view your content without you having to abide by their rules.
Note that banning "all porn" is easier than accurately sorting child porn from regular porn at that scale as it lets you avoid pissing off petite 20 year olds or getting in trouble because your moderators OKed a report of what turned out to be a more developed 16 year old.
So yes, Apple may only have required Tumblr to more effectively moderate to prevent child porn, but from a business feasibility point of view the practical way to do that was ban all porn.
Twitter is probably big enough that more Apple users would complain if Apple enforced such a hardline policy, and has a pre-existing relationship with apple (If I recall correctly, Twitter and Facebook were the first two share with opitons on iOS), so Apple is more likely to forward on complaints than nuke them? Twitter also requires more personal data (e.g. phone numbers for new accounts), so that may discourage users from posting illegal content in the first place.
Yes. But to remove only child porn and not all porn requires you to have some way of determining what is child porn. So you need to sort it into "child porn, remove" and "porn of consenting adults, allow".
the person you replied to was being unnecessarily semantic, but in computer science "sort" has a specific meaning which is only the ordering of a set. So 'sorting' cp implies making it easier to find specific cp.
The more accurate word might be "categorize" or "filter".
It was obvious what was meant by "sort" when reading the full text, but I think the counter-point was more of a tongue-in-cheek retort regarding the above than an actual complaint.
Same as pornhub. No one wants revenge porn or CSAM. But FB Messenger is the largest distributor of that material. So long as companies are making a good faith best effort, or minimally the treatment should be the same.
Forward looking is subjective here. Humanitarian issues should be weighed heavier than technological development. It’s easy to relax rules later but you can’t take back human suffering.
Child porn is an excuse. Every site above a certain size will have some, no matter how good their filtering. And sometimes even small sites when they come under attack. Then whoever wants to get rid of the site for unrelated reasons points to it, says "It has child porn", and no matter how quickly it is removed after reported, or how much effort the admins spend removing it, "it has child porn" is technically true, and gives whoever wanted to remove the site the excuse to do so.
It's nothing more than ammo that corporations use against each other in the fight for dominance, or sometimes, with the help of cooperative media, against politically disfavored sites like 4chan. In all my time browsing 4chan, I have not once seen child porn, though I did see posts 404'd for having contained child porn. Yet despite their efforts, any time the media talks about 4chan, they will introduce it in the same breath as child porn.
In short, child porn has become nothing but a tool for corporations fighting for dominance, or a fnord to tell the masses to stay away. And in all of this no-one gives a crap about the children, since they rarely spend even a word talking about tracking down the uploaders or creators of said porn (i.e. they say a site "has child porn", but not how fast it is removed, or if the site gives the IP of child-porn uploaders to the police, or anything beyond trying to establish in the viewer a bad site <-> child porn association).
> And in all of this no-one gives a crap about the children, since they rarely spend even a word talking about tracking down the uploaders or creators of said porn (i.e. they say a site "has child porn", but not how fast it is removed, or if the site gives the IP of child-porn uploaders to the police, or anything beyond trying to establish in the viewer a bad site <-> child porn association).
Aren't there legal requirements in place for this stuff, at least in the US?
I assume so. But this is not a legal attack - complying with the law isn't enough to keep hosting or payment providers from blacklisting you to safeguard their reputation.
I moved from android to Apple recently and that is really pathetic indeed. It keeps predicting and correcting words that are obviously not what meant at all.
It has gone significantly worse over the years. About 3 years ago it did not have any issue even when mixing languages in the same message. Now it gets confused all the time and puts stupid suggestions even in the keyboard's language. I am not sure what is happening, but it is very annoying.
There is something about Apple's keyboard, whether it's software, the physical placement of the on screen keys, or something, but when I use an iPhone, I make many more errors than I do on my LG Android phones. I haven't been able to figure out why really, but it is definitely the case.
You can add custom words so that your iOS device will suggest them. Go to Settings, search for Text Replacement, add a new replacement with +, enter the same word for both replacement and shortcut.
There are many words you would not want to send in a text to your coworkers, such as when you ask them to "re jigger the Q2 results." The only question is where the line is drawn for the OS to say "it's better that I never autocorrect into this perfectly real English word."
It makes sense to not include all medical words because technical jargon changes all the time, but common swear words are very old. The word "fuck" is more than a millennium old and every speaker would have understood you. It's not Tim Apple's business to determine what words people are allowed to use.
The idea that expletives are not normal words is wrong. Common people have always spoken plainly. They would not have called their asses "bottoms" etc.
> It's not Tim Apple's business to determine what words people are allowed to use.
Given that auto-correct is a function of software then yes, word selection is part of Apple's business. There are two parts to the solution. The technical aspect is probably not at issue. The socio-political component is going to reflect mainstream corporate culture and probably not meet many corner cases. The significant choices aren't Apple's to make sense they will bow to the anathema dictates of social and political power: such as Winnie the Poo in certain Chinese contexts or Swastikas in German ones.
All words have their own categories. There are an innumerable number of categories you can put any word into. Give me a single word that can't be put into a special category; you can't do it.
The question is not is it a custom word or when it entered into the English language.
The question is "as a parent, would you buy an {x} phone for a young family member that suggests profanity?"
As an adult, you can go in and add the words that you want to use yourself... however, do you want profanity to be a default suggested word for children in your household?
Realizing that the demographics of HN tends to the more technically literate, removing the all the words you don't want your children accidentally sending to their teachers wouldn't be a big issue, however as most of the population isn't as technically literate the "it just works" mentality for digital appliances would mean that most of the population that has a child who may use the phone would likely opt to one that is more proper and correct in its limited word choice.
According to an article I read a while back, the predictive text is not supposed to suggest / correct to a different word if you type fuck, but it is not supposed to suggest fuck if you mistype it.
That seems eminently reasonable to me, without being "safety standards".
Yes, modern English is certainly saltier than what people pretended it was for the last century or so, but the line that Apple took seems to be the right line (allow offence without correction, do not suggest offence by default).
There are many things on which I disagree with Apple’s stance (I think that Apple should allow pornographic apps in the store, but that those apps should have tighter controls on them to prevent some of the scammiest behaviours reported against pornographic sites; I also think that Apple should be doing a lot more to prevent abuse of the pricing tools that it does have).
But the undeniable experience of many many iPhone users is that you have probably seen the soft keyboard autocorrect to "duck" many times when you intended to write "fuck".
The soft keyboard is always using some heuristics to identify which characters you intended to type. In most cases it's quite accurate, but in this case it seems like it's over-counting the probability you would have typed "duck" or "ducking" by a fairly wide margin.
> Are these the same safety standards that cause apple predictive text to refuse to recognise the cuss words I a grown adult use and have to go back and fix over and over again.
Only related in the sense that Apple takes steps to prevent surprise adult content. Just as porn is obviously trivial to consume with Apple devices, autocomplete can happily suggest your favorite salty language.
Note that there are very good security reasons for this, as the keyboards can read everything you type. There are contexts in which defense in depth is more important than convenience.
I understand the security issues. I still feel I should be able to choose who I trust. I trust my keyboard maker more than I trust Apple. Further, my keyboard has my completions, my autocorrect history, and I'm used to it. Every time Apple's crappy keyboard appears it's as bad as someone asking me to type an a Dvorak keyboard.
I mean they could just make that some option under parental controls. Course even then I’m sure some subset of adults would complain that their phone is suggesting naughty language.
I think you’re right. They hobbled it, and made it less useful because they couldn’t trust it. A fairly solid example of why we’ll never attain the singularity: it’s bad for business.
If you think about it, you're probably glad they do this. Consider the damage that a stray "f*ck" could do if you didn't mean to type it and didn't notice that you did. Could even spell a lawsuit I bet in some cases.
I've got an Android phone and I've never been able to swipe type swear words. And I'm kinda glad too. Yeah, it's a little annoying when I actually intend to type that word, but it would be way more annoying if it showed up when I didn't. I imagine it's this kind of reasoning that's behind why those words aren't available in auto-complete or swipe to type. Some people in this thread seem to be suggesting it's some kind of moral overreach or impulse to censor that's behind this behavior. I think that's an exaggeration and the real reason is the more simple and practical one that I've described.
You're exactly right — surprise porn and surprise expletives at Apple scale would probably trigger a congressional hearing. Not only does Messages not censor what you type, but one can easily leverage autocorrect to help you type the naughtiest of words.
Are these the same safety standards that cause apple predictive text to refuse to recognise the cuss words I a grown adult use and have to go back and fix over and over again. Ducking stupid if you ask me.