Samsung is insanely thin skinned; deletes 90% of questions from their own AMA | Hacker News Reader

Samsung is insanely thin skinned; deletes 90% of questions from their own AMA

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94 pointstapper40 comments

Samsung products suck. I had everything from TVs, phones, and other devices outright fail under warranty only to find they would not honor it. I finally stopped giving them my money, but I am not surprised to hear that they are using such tactics. Their brand reputation is utter garbage, and apparently they full well know it.

Yeah I have a family member with Samsung appliances. The microwave actually often runs for a moment after you close its door (when the microwave time has completed and you opened the door and got your item out, and then closed the door). The fridge is the worst-designed fridge I've ever used in my life. It's split vertically, and the icemaker/water-dispenser takes up a seriously large portion of the freezer side. It's mind-boggling. Half the cells on the LCD of the oven don't work. The oven light switches on and off repeatedly as you open the oven door. All of these appliances are a handful of years old...

Oh I have a Samsung monitor, and pretty much exactly at a year, it developed a problem where, if you turn it on after it was off for some time, it gets this really strange "displays nothing but weird clouds of blurred colours" effect. Exactly like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sMoHEJaNd10 Sad stuff. Never buying another product from them again.

Isnt that hust the microwave fan running for a few more seconds to clear iut the steam?

Maybe? But it only started happening recently, and no settings or anything have been changed. It makes the bassy operational noise as if it's indeed actually warming :-O

From a pre 2000s perspective, their hard drives and phones don't seem to be ruled by the same thinking as the rest of Samsung.

In the 90s I watched Samsung screw over my region's (Australia, North Queensland) warranty repair business, actually they worked on all brands but maybe it was just coincidence that Samsung products represented a large part of their work. It was a thriving business with many employees. The company offended Samsung, the crime was after getting tired of numerous warranty returns (like a month after fixing it,) technicians started replacing a transistor or scr here and there that was actually suitable for the circuit and not under rated with a fingers crossed and perfect power supply conditions might last till end of warranty. The company was paid half yearly and once Samsung found out about their crime, not being paid (not even cents on the dollar) meant the company was on the hook for it, too much, and they closed their doors perhaps bankrupt and to date no business has taken its place. In a eye watering display of solidarity, no business in the region sold Samsung branded products for almost a decade, only giving up when big tech chains moved into the region.

I wouldn't buy Samsung unless it's via a division that seems to be run by people who care their product will last.

A long time ago I bought, for a hefty sum, a 30" Samsung Syncmaster display, new. When it arrived, it had a column of dead pixels. They took six weeks to replace it under warranty. And when the replacement finally arrived... it was a refurbished model. And that one lasted only a year before it died.

Ever since, I have avoided Samsung in all product categories.

I don’t buy Samsung anything anymore. Everything I have owned that is Samsung—TVs, computer hardware, kitchen appliances, etc.—has broken in some way within a year or two. Usually not so much that it is unusable, but in a way that a core functionality simply does not work.

I had a pair of 2015 era Samsung Android tablets that were perfectly fine. I cracked the screen on one and was able to get it repaired at a local shop for under $100.

Fast forward to last year when I bought an S22. It's not a BAD phone, per se, but very overpriced. I would love to get rid of the bloatware (I don't root my daily driver phones) and it would be cool if it would last more than 6 hours on a charge. In all fairness, the camera is quite nice.

I also would love to have a 3.5mm jack and a removable battery, but meh.

I recently got a Packt feature phone to try out. Works fine. When I'm in the car I hook my tablet up to it (it's also a hotspot) and it's completely acceptable. Big screen google maps. Only wish I could get a GPS receiver for my tablet.

I'm mostly done with mobile phones anyway. My kids are grown so I'm not freaked out about being out of touch all the time. Gonna rock a land line for a while now that I'm old. Maybe also get a Commodore 64 off ebay. I wish I was kidding. But I got old. Smart phones just don't do it for me anymore.

>. I would love to get rid of the bloatware (I don't root my daily driver phones) and it would be cool if it would last more than 6 hours on a charge. In all fairness, the camera is quite nice

you can kill of bloatware with adb or in case you want nice interface adbappcontrol. no root required

Agree. They will forever remain in mind associated with exploding washing machines [1]. Their fridges are a laughingstock. They used to build decent relatively-open mobile devices that lasted a while but that also seems no longer true.

[1]: https://www.consumerreports.org/washing-machines/some-samsun...

I've had 4 Samsung phones (s4, s6, s10, Flip Z3) and a few TVs. This is not reflective of my experience with Samsung products. Their products don't suck at all.

That's an anecdote. I've also had shitty experiences with Samsung products. Maybe it's a mixed bag but I hear more bad than good without going out and looking for it.

And your experience + what you've heard is what, data? Versus being a collection of anecdotes?

Currently it's the washing machine that just ... doesn't work occasionally. Power is good to it, confirmed with an electrician but it won't turn on. Give it a bit and it works. Prior it was phones having software issues but that was more than a few years ago at this point so I don't remember specifics.

My Samsung phones have been fine.

My S5 is an absolute trooper. My partner and I both had S5s, and played the "no phone game" for years where one would randomly try to smack the phone out of the others hands, maybe try to throw it out an open window or something. Ironically we both smashed our screens on the same day at our respective workplaces by dropping them on gravel. Still, her one survived a swim in the toilet with a smashed screen, then a swim in isoprop, and a few weeks in a jar of rice. Not that she wanted to use it after that.

Me too, I'm still using one and it's great.

I think my last three phones have been Samsung, and all of them have been good.

I won't be with them for my next phone however, unless they return the headphone jack.

The S4 is what convinced me to switch from Android to iOS. Did yours not have overheating issues?

yeah same my s3 and s6 were both great, and I considered staying with samsung before choosing a pixel at the time

I am using a Samsung Galaxy phone purchased in Oct 2020 and it is still rocking. I don't see any problem it last another two years. Same for a Galaxy Tab tablet I own. They are not ideal in many ways but I don't have complaints about their quality.

Your anecdotal experience is no more valuable than my or another random person's anecdotal experience.

The products can suck but support has been great to me recently. The last NVME drive I had of theirs which failed two years after buying it was still under warranty when I called. It took about 10 minutes for them to ask for my receipt and then send me a credit in the amount of the full purchase amount. A+

I have a Samsung laser printer which is good - cheap reliable no nonsense (M2026). So of course HP bought Samsung printers to kill the product. C'est la vie.

To be fair, there is zero proof in this video that (a) comments were deleted and (b) that it was Samsung that did it.

Unddit shows a lot of removed comments on the reddit thread in the video description: https://www.unddit.com/r/u_SamsungMobileUS/comments/10r7inq/...

Unfortunately it didn't capture what they were.

Given how quickly they were deleted, it’s almost certainly AutoModerator. Either Samsung configured AutoModerator to require manual approval on all questions — and they just only approved ones they intended to reply to — or it went a bit haywire and they didn’t catch up with it.

Given brands are typically quite controlling of the content they put out — this AMA was on their profile — I’d be almost certain that they had a plan to only approve comments they replied to and they didn’t get to reply to as many as they hoped due to time constraints.

We (nerds) forget that in most cases, people engaging with Reddit etc. in a professional capacity have other work to do, they probably spent an hour or 2 in total replying to questions, which is only enough time to review and reply to a few dozen at best.

I’d be shocked if this was intentional removal by Samsung due to the content of the questions — nobody at Samsung would bother deleting all these comments even if they didn’t like them, that would be far too much effort.

> Either Samsung configured AutoModerator to require manual approval on all questions — and they just only approved ones they intended to reply to — or it went a bit haywire and they didn’t catch up with it.

> I’d be shocked if this was intentional removal by Samsung due to the content of the questions.

I’d argue that refusing to put the comment up based on its content is essentially the same as immediately removing it based on its content.

I guess that's strictly true in the context of reddit but not really true in the spirit of the behaviour. Samsung wanted to allow people to ask questions which they could then answer: it's only because we're so used to reddit's paradigm -- all comments are visible by default -- that this is unexpected. If you were to use pretty much any other platform, it would be up to the question-solicitor to choose what questions are answered and thus seen -- e.g: on Instagram.

What you're describing is a staged PR event rather than an AMA, which I agree that this is exactly what they wanted.

At that point they might as well submit their own questions with sock puppets and go all in on the farce.

And a big smack to the face for the activity "Ask Me Anything"

I'm glad I watched that before firing off a knee jerk response about moderation. I will point out that he is complaining that his question didn't show up right away and he is taking that personally. I would simply assume that my comment was loaded into a moderation queue and may or may not be approved at some future time, and check back later. That's how disqus and other comment systems all seem to work these days. I don't take offense to it. I simply am less likely to comment on those systems in the future when that happens to me. If I spent the time to write the comment, and they didn't have the courtesy to allow the comment, that's just my response. Vote with my keystrokes.

He took the time to make a 4 minute video complaining about all sorts of personal issues he had with Samsung, because they didn't take his comment. I think he may be the one who is thin skinned.

This isn't how Reddit comments work, it's against the general ethics of an AMA, and it has been a week and the majority of comments are still hidden. I don't think you actually watched the video.

Just got a S22 Ultra a few months ago, and man it's pure garbage compared to my previous phone (mate20 pro). Some of the issues I've faced though are seemingly normal problems - ui lag, low quality camera results, etc - which I thought I could go onto samsung user groups for help with to no avail.

They must be starting to realize they are in trouble. They are big enough to be capable of developing quality products but have decided to focus on quickly developed features and hype instead. Who cares if the phone sucks to use when it FOLDS WOW? This is going to be expensive to fix.

Samsung is garbage, I don't know how they became so popular.

Well they moved all their factories out of China now so expect things to get better.

The hardware is usually not the worst part of Samsung products

Its probably the best part of it.

I've seen videos of this guy before, and he always leaves a bad taste in my mouth. Wasn't he pumping some crypto pump and dumps just 2 years ago? I could be totally wrong. I do agree though Samsung makes trash.

I think you're mistaken. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3UAaky12REM for example.

This is totally OT but what microphone is he using?

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