A bug which affected only left handed users

it's not a derisive term. it's just a nickname for a left-handed pitcher in baseball, because their left hand is on the south side of the pitcher when pitching in whatever field that term was coined in. it is a nickname that stuck for some reason. i've never felt that term to be derisive in my life.

You don't seem to use scissors.

Anything that isn't symmetrical. Mice and keyboards. Circular saws. Tape measures. Box cutters. Folding knives. Garden tools. Those are just ones that impacted me recently.

Some have lefty versions but there is less selection. I recently found a left-handed weeding sickle and it is the best thing. Most of them are just annoying. I can do most things with right hand but then have to switch hands instead of the natural motion. But there are a few that are dangerous.

Scissors are the other big one; most of them are designed so that when to try to use them with your left hand, you end up pushing the blades apart slightly so they don't cut as well (or at all).

With that being said, self-deprecating jokes about how left-handedness is an affront to God are definitely a prominent feature of lefty culture.

(Edit: I guess formal place-setting is another area of society that assumes right-handedness, as well as restaurants that pack people close enough together that everyone needs to use the same hands to avoid elbowing each other.)

it's all over the place. when you hold a pen or pencil in your right hand, any text is right-side up. put it in your left hand; the text is now upside down.

there are millions of little things like that. millions. right-handed people will never ever notice them. left-handed people can not avoid noticing them.

pens & pencils

notebooks.

IP phones.

headsets (they have the mic on the left so you can scratch your face with your right hand without bumping the microphone.)

monitors (controls are on the back, right-hand side)

keyboards

mice

AND THIS IS JUST THE THINGS THAT ARE PRESENT ON MY DESK RIGHT NOW.

badge readers are always on the right-hand side of a door.

power buttons are always on the right, even on remote controls.

etc., etc., etc.

everything that is asymmetrical in any way is biased for right-handed people around 99.99% of the time. I occasionally get something from China which has accidental bias for left, but those things also have no obvious thought to the usability of anything at all.

it is maddening seeing this all day every day everywhere you go. "you are not like us" is all I get out of it and it just chips away at me with a microscopic chisel.

The industrial design and the UI design of all things tends to default to the 85% of people who are right handed and aren’t aware of potential limitations.

This is translated into issues into the items others have listed.

There’s at least 3 of us still on iPhone 13 Minis, and I plan to keep it going until Apple caves and makes a sensibly sized phone again.

I agree that phones are too big. I refuse to switch to two-handed phone use. I used the Palm Phone PVG 100 with a 3.3" screen as long as I could, but software got too slow and battery-hungry, and my now-wife was annoyed when my phone would die halfway through our text based conversations lol. Used a chunky 3.5"er (Soyes S10Max) for awhile but it died after a year.

Now I use the Motorola Razr 2025. 90% of the time I just keep it closed. The outer screen is 3.6" and a square, but the screen doesn't extend all the way out if you keep the hinge on the side. It's kinda heavy at 6.6oz (compared to the Palm Phone's 2.2oz), but with a ring, it's super easy to use one-handed. And it has battery life and compute power to handle today's unnecessarily compute-heavy apps. You can also split apps in half when it's open so you can just use them on the bottom half of the phone.

Pictures:

https://www.middleendian.com/phone.jpg

https://www.middleendian.com/phone-with-keyboard.jpg

Main disadvantage is that when it's closed, you only have a "selfie" camera as the back camera is facing you and the front camera is inside. So it's hard to quickly take pictures of things I see outside (usually funny birds). Other annoyance is that if you open the phone, use it, and then close it, the outer keyboard resets to the default keyboard and you need to "change the keyboard layout" to get it to use your preferred keyboard (Microsoft Swiftkey in my case)

I have a regular pixel 10, and I can palm a basketball. But I can't use this phone one handed.

If you have an iPhone, enabling reachability is very nice [1].

[1] https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/use-reachability-iph1...

I’m a guy who’ll leave his laptop on the floor and will bend double from a chair to use it, on the floor, because I have forgotten I can pick it up. I am ergonomically insensitive.

Anyway, I use my phone in my left hand, my right hand, or both, pretty much equally.

Get a ring for the back of your phone. Makes one handed use much easier.

That's actually the first thing that came to my mind when reading about thumb scrolling, since I use a trackball. But that wouldn't explain why left or right handed scrolling would be different.

Oh no sir, I am merely a humble boorish villain.

Making bad assumptions about data seems more likely than deliberate malice. If you A/B test different designs, and you see a huge increase in "interactions" with some design, you'll tend to assume that's a positive thing, unless you spend the time to interview a lot of customers to figure out what's going on.

I think they do encourage it - probably due to marketing. If you are getting paid per click its in your best interest to get someone to click irrespective of content. Snapchat do it with the scroll up feature, instead of it going to the next clip as most doom scrollers do, it goes straight to a profile. Vice Versa on other popular platforms. That little 'glitch' for a second, and now a new popup came at just the time you were about to press right where your digit is and you are loading onto a sponsored site. Of course the sponsor then boasts look how many clicks you have got.

NYT games app loads in an interstitial screen with a play button, as you go to click it they shift it up and put a subscribe button there so that when you click you accidentally click subscribe. Evil genius.

It could be accidental, but without that there's no reason to have the interstitial screen at all.

I get more useful and up-to-date info from LinkedIn than from here.

Android has an old person setting with larger text and icons and explicit home/back buttons.

I might set up my parents with it, but I currently have it on my phone in my attempt to make my phone less addictive.

The combination of a black and white screen, old person setting squeezing out information, and turning off animations makes my phone feel shitty to use without having to actually block Instagram (which is commonly used for messaging in my circles) or any other app.