I'm surprised you have that takeaway for NFC since you have played some rhythm games at least. For the most part I'd say on most rhythm games I've played (IIDX, SDVX, Groove Coaster) it's pretty much storing your song scores so you can see what you've played before and you can go to another arcade and have the same data there too. I feel it's less of a grinding thing and more of a player convenience there.
An interesting thing is that you don't have to buy their NFC card either, most of the Konami cabs (e-amusement) can accept a Suica/any IC transit card (a side effect of their card systems both using FeliCa).
I learned this back in the day when running into daily transfer limits on free file sharing websites. Big hassle when trying to download multi-part zip archives on a weekend.
Nowadays people upload to Google Drive, plus other hosts have more relaxed limits, so I haven't had the need to do it as often. But it's still useful to know.
I feel that Nokia has really filled the hole that the Nexus phones used to provide at the mid-range price point. When the only better alternative is from Google themselves (Pixel 3a) that is pretty impressive.
I remember sideloading the Flash Player APK on my Android phone around 2013 (they stopped official support in 4.1) and most of the Flash content was effectively unusable even then.
Pecking on a tiny video player with your finger to change volume, quality, or playback position was a terrible experience and the battery drain wasn't great either. Watching videos outside of YouTube was a terrible time for phone users before sites transitioned to HTML5.
> But (purely anecdotally) the viewership seems to be limited to that demographic.
From the opposite perspective of a 20 something, my more technical friends with a genuine interest (the type to build their own PC/NAS clusters, Arch Linux/Gentoo users) are the ones I know that do browse HN regularly. We're still around but I also can see most people would rather browse Reddit.
I'd like to think the conversations here have more substance than on other sites and that is still a major draw.
An interesting thing is that you don't have to buy their NFC card either, most of the Konami cabs (e-amusement) can accept a Suica/any IC transit card (a side effect of their card systems both using FeliCa).