I think that a lot of this recent push to monetize has surrounded the content on the site being used for AI models and big data with the intent to IPO. If all you can offer to consumers training a large language model is sexy photos of John Oliver and Olde timey speak. Then it becomes a lot less appealing as training data. I do agree that this will increase engagement, but if the alternative is hostile takeover maybe this is good?
My heart goes out to the devs. They have inherented the most tech savvy and generally resistant portion of Reddit. God save their souls
Unfortunately, what you are asking can really only be done on a rooted device and, to my knowledge, Snapchat has root detection which will prevent it from working. There are potentially some 3rd party apps you could use, but those run the risk of deactivating your account
Give it some time. Devs have had to go from a nonexistent community to tens of thousands. It will take some time to iron out the kinks especially with distributed open source developers. As for 'soon' I'd say probably a week at the absolute minimum. Growing pains of a new technology
I think there has been a major culture shift. YouTube used to prioritize the subscriber feed where you curated your own content. Now it is the home feed where it is fed by algorithm. Shorts seems to be an extension of this where it is pretty much non stop algorithmic feed. If you were used to the old way the new way seems strange, but if not I guess the new way is more intuitive? I couldn't say
Unfortunately, because most Android phones lack any kind of depth sensing hardware, there really is so good way of doing photogrammetry on an Android device. There are a couple, but they are cloud based. If you are okay with that I could provide some suggestions.
I would say go with an older Apple phone. Their stock parental controls tend to be a bit better than what you can get on Android without modding, and (let's be real) it will probably be supported for longer. When they get older you can disable the features to their maturity level.
Check the github for feature requests. If it isn't there then feel free to add it. The devs are doing all they can and honestly it has been amazing how well they have handled a massive influx of users
I think this is going to be a generational divide. Most of my millennial friends will insist on landscape while zoomers tend to default to portrait.
As someone who had to Google a bunch of docker issues and constantly got redirected to locked down subreddits, I'm all for developers hosting their own communities. At least then they have an incentive to keep the communities alive.