The variety of stories, nonchalance with which you tell them, and a few key signs of exaggeration had me writing off your comments. This one has me publicly saying it.

yeah, sure, all those "early 2000s" "smart phones" with "video" and enough capacity for "home made porn" That was way too short ago to exaggerate this baldly.

Early 2000’s we’re talking phones like the Nokia 6600

https://www.cnet.com/reviews/nokia-6600-review/

> You can also capture the moment on video with the handset's video recorder, which renders brief (10-second), fuzzy images and lo-fi audio. The 6600 stores clips as QCIF files in resolutions of either 176x144 or 128x96, and you can play them using the phone's onboard RealOne player. We got an undeniable kick out of shooting video with the 6600, but the actual clips aren't exactly Oscar worthy. As with the phone book, picture and video storage is limited by only the phone's available memory, but if you're running low, you can store your recordings on the included 32MB MMC media.

Nobody’s saying they were hour long HD professional porn productions

That's why serial exaggerators are corrosive to a community. Yeah, did phones with a video camera exist? Yup. You would have had to be there, know the 8-step fermi estimate chain for the likelihood for a multitude of reasons. (ex. these were slow, terrible beasts extremely difficult to use, they'd very rarely be a heat of the moment option, and if you were preparing, there were a multitude of 100x quality options that anyone who had a video shooting phone then would have had)

Even then you have no defense for taking them too literally, there could be 1000 reasons you're actually just angry and taking it out on them, have a personal dislike, etc.

Another way to talk about why it's clear: inter-alia, multiple rich "bored housewives" throwing themselves at computer repairmen is about as likely as obtaining multiple smart phones with video capabilities and videos and selfshot porn videos on them in the early 2000s. Much less when you start throwing stuff in like "actually I was warned of [the housewives x computer repairman problem] before I took the job!" Lmao.

Usually you wanna be thinking about the cumulative probability of what they say, not the one-off probability.

Are you OK? You keep saying video, why? There were video clips, but mostly photos. This was the UK where these types of phones were very commonplace -- your experience might be from a USA perspective where flip phones were still the rage? :)

You've probably never had to repair phones or buy them online used.

What op said very much lines up with my own experience.

I remember flip phones with all kinds of stuff on them.

This was 2004 through 2005.

This was the site:

https://web.archive.org/web/20040925205401/http://txtstar.co...

Could you share them?