"Say something nice!" on empty conversations - consider removing?

Using /e/OS Applications
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Does anyone know what the rationale was for including this in the UI? I realise it seems both odd to look so deeply into something like this - which may not have any particular rationale behind it and might just be trend-following - and to question something that seems like it could only be a positive thing, but there are a few reasons I don’t like these kinds of elements:

  • They are often overly cutesy IMO
  • They are an example, however innocuous, of the device telling the user what to do as opposed to the other way around
  • It seems inappropriate for the phone’s UI to not be neutral regarding the kind content the user writes on it. Having UI elements that include a value judgment is inherently distracting to me - the UI should just be there to inform the user about the state and available actions in the app.
  • Since the phone isn’t actually intelligent and the message is fixed, there will be contexts in which the message is inappropriate for a whole range of different reasons
2 Likes
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it’s just from upstream, not introduced by /e/ - you can do custom strings in forks, but it’s a maintenance burden. Make your case in the qksms issue tracker - https://github.com/moezbhatti/qksms/blob/c86ea1082d2c0f3af846487fbe8198ce5cc01b44/presentation/src/main/res/values/strings.xml#L110

1 Like
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Hello.
100% agreeing on this, and more … like on anything else that these machines :

  • propose without any request from me (just like advertising does in RL),
  • enforce me to do by default, because the developer of the app/service did a wrong choice about the default setting, or ergonomics, and the app / service does not save user settings (ex with Android 10: force-disable the “extreme battery energy saver” when the phone is charged, force-enable the “fast charging” mode at boot time, force a swipe up gesture to get to the desktop when awaking the phone even when there’s no “session” pass code, …),
  • prevent me from doing for security reasons (“security” : a work that’s used to justify any stupidity), like (Android 10, most browsers) open a local HTML file in a browser though a simple and “standard” file:// URL (rather than forcing to go though a system / app service that generates a temporary URL that works … but that you can’t bookmark …).
    I simply want to do my own choices (the device is mine, I want to use it the way I want) and the machine / device to wait for my requests.
    Probably old fashioned, by the way.
1 Like
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Ah OK. Thanks for the clarification!

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