A bug which affected only left handed users

https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2026/07/a-bug-which-only-affected-left-handed-users/

by sixhobbits • 14 days ago

133 95 14 days ago

sixhobbits• 14 days ago

something similar actually really annoys me on linkedin mobile, I'm left handed and often accidentally like posts if I scroll my feed as the like button is very close to where I naturally touch the screen to scroll.

loloquwowndueo• 14 days ago

The solution is simple : don’t use LinkedIn :) I only use it when looking for a job and I never look at the “feed” (what’s that for anyway?)

throw12345678914• 14 days ago

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

nja• 14 days ago

sometimes I wonder if things like this are actually dark patterns to _encourage_ accidentally clicking 'like' etc.

similar to how in Threads, the '...' icon (under which 'save' is hidden) is so small that half the time clicking on it just clicks the entire thread (opening it to view replies) -- sometimes I suspect they make the target extra small on purpose

or how on FB, some of the options in the menu are now under the AI generated content, which pops in just slowly enough to encourage misclicks as items shift under your finger

all to make some PM's numbers go up, of course...

relaxedmedal• 14 days ago

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.

pbhjpbhj• 14 days ago

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.

nitwit005• 14 days ago

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.

LeifCarrotson• 14 days ago

I'm not left-handed, but I often scroll my phone with my left thumb. My right hand is on my computer mouse, or holding a pen, or employed to make precise touches on the phone screen with my right index finger, or briefly comes over to join with my left thumb for typing...

Scrolling doesn't require much precision, and I naturally hold my phone in my left hand.

Terr_2• 14 days ago

A bug which won't be triggered by righteous people but infuriating to those who will surely be left behind after The Rapture™.

Or perhaps the righteous versus the sinister.

PTOB• 14 days ago

I approve of Latin jokes. Well done.

Terr_2• 14 days ago

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

gpvos• 14 days ago

I'm righthanded and I usually hold my phone in my left hand so I can do clicking and typing with my right hand, but I often do basic scrolling with my left thumb.

recursive• 14 days ago

I'm a man with typically sized hands. I can barely do anything one-handed on a phone. Phones are so big they basically require two-handed operation for me. Like you, I typically hold it in my left hand, so I can use my right hand to tap stuff.

madaxe_again• 14 days ago

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.

ThrowawayTestr• 14 days ago

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

robin_reala3• 14 days ago

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.

MiddleEndian3• 14 days ago

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)

IncreasePosts• 14 days ago

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

nomel• 14 days ago

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

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

sscaryterry• 14 days ago

The older I get, the more sausage fingers I get.

TacticalCoder• 14 days ago

The older I get, the more sausage fingers I get.

It seems with age fingers do not just get fatter (feet too btw) but also get drier. So the keys do not register as well on smartphones: older people hitting right in the middle of the virtual keys, one by one, in a slow but decided manner are not "just old". There's apparently some science behind it.

annzabelle• 14 days ago

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.

walthamstow• 14 days ago

One of the great things about promoting LLMs is I don't have to care about sausage finger typos any more

dools• 14 days ago

To obtain a special dialling wand, please mash the keypad with your palm now

incognito124• 14 days ago

Reminds me of this old youtube bug where some of the videos that were uploaded ended up upside down because of a phone orientation during recording:

https://bruteforceswimathon.medium.com/youtube-help-my-video...

BrenBarn2• 14 days ago

I had to read this a couple times and look at the comments here before I realized they were talking about scrolling on a phone. I was like "who scrolls with their thumb?"

Zecc• 14 days ago

Trackballs are a thing as well.

BrenBarn2• 14 days ago

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.

cwillu• 14 days ago

Right-handed, and I run into this bug constantly.

naikrovek4• 14 days ago

As a lefty, his tongue in cheek derision toward lefties still pisses me off genuinely.

I’m old enough to have been smacked around by a teacher as a kid for writing with my left hand. Right-handed bias is EVERYWHERE. Everywhere. Right-handed people will never notice it until they look for it, and even then it’s hard to see.

So yeah I am sure the ribbing is nothing more than “a sensible chuckle” for right-handed people, us southpaws are not laughing. And if you try to tell me you are, I seriously doubt that you are left-handed.

sapphicsnail• 14 days ago

I'm sorry it upset you. I thought it was funny but I'm also younger and I think I escaped most of the dextrocentric bullshit my parents' generation had to deal with. My mom was forced to use her right hand but it was mostly just an inconvenience for me. I like making jokes about being sinister (literally the Latin word for left) but I'd probably feel differently if people smacked me over it.

what2• 14 days ago

Can you elaborate on this “right handed bias”? I can’t think of anything other than a can opener where it might matter?

csande17• 14 days ago

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.)

ianburrell3• 14 days ago

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.

tetrisgm3• 14 days ago

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.

naikrovek4• 13 days ago

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.

gambiting6• 14 days ago

But you just called yourself a southpaw - what is that, if not self derision?

And anyway, it reads more like making fun out of the almost religious belief that left handed people don't exist held not by the writer but by developers of wordpress.

naikrovek4• 13 days ago

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.

not-kinsale-joe• 14 days ago

I am left handed and and it did not bother me at all. Probably because you seem to have faced discrimination and I never have.

chopin• 13 days ago

You don't seem to use scissors.

tetrisgm3• 14 days ago

Yep

paulmooreparks• 14 days ago

I'm right-handed, and I hold my phone in my left hand and scroll my phone with my left thumb.

pmontra• 14 days ago

It makes sense to use the left hand as phone holder to be free to use the right hand to do some other activity, example: I will have my breakfast while reading HN.

However I usually keep my phone with my right hand and scroll with my right thumb. Furthermore I am writing this comment by swiping with my right thumb. I can swipe with my left thumb but I'm not as accurate.

Gunax• 14 days ago

The worst curse put upon us is XNA games engine, which was unable to distinguish primary from secondary clicks. So players who swapped mouse buttons at the OS level were out of luck.

Most developers assumed that left click = primary click, but that's only true about 95% of the time.

Terraria, among others, still has this bug.

queenkjuul2• 10 days ago

As i was scrolling the comments with my left hand, i inadvertently opened comment replies three times...

A bug which affected only left handed users

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