Signal Introduces Stories

'Stories' were made popular by Snapchat in 2013, and they became the most-frequently used part of the app. They're a good way to give life status updates to a lot of friends at once, and provides a good conversation starter. This revives friendships and keeps communications going.

From my experience, they are a non-optional part of socializing. By my estimation, my social and professional networking has materially suffered by not using Instagram or a Snapchat for most of my life. I wish this were not the case.

Stories are popular because a lot of people have uses for them, but it's hard to articulate why they're useful. I'll try to explain:

A website/blog wouldn't be better, because (1) a tiny fraction of people know about RSS, (2) a tiny fraction of people know how to make their own website/blog, (3) a website/blog is not as well-suited for on-the-fly updates like stories, and (4) absent RSS, nobody will check all $n$ of their friend's personal blogs as often as they open their messaging app.

Furthermore, (1) stories are not crawled by default in an easy-to-access way (like Google or the internet archive), (2) the 24-hour time lock leads to different kinds of posts

Then do it insecurely and warn the user. 'We can't figure out how to do this securely' is their BS excuse for every bad design decision or unimplemented feature.

You might say 'but they don't want to make people less secure, people will get the wrong idea!' But they do this already, in ways that are much worse than allowing the user to make a security decision for themselves.

You can change a setting to prevent screenshots inside the Signal phone app, so you can't take screenshots. Your conversations are now secure, right? Nobody can take pictures of your disappearing messages! WRONG. You can turn on that feature and I can still take screenshots all day, including disappearing messages that you send to me.

Likewise, Signal can't tell if you're downloading pictures or copying text I send to you. You could be backing up everything - my only 'assurance' is that you probably aren't doing it because it's inconvenient.

You can change disappearing messages timer to anything you want! Great! But the change of timer is itself a message. So if we are arrested and police get into one person's Signal, they can see when disappearing messages were turned on and when the timer was lengthened or shortened. Sure, the messages disappeared, but what were you doing on August 23rd at 7:39pm that made you change the timer to 10 minute4s for 3 hours? We know where you were because of your phone's IMEI, I guess we will tell the court that you were trying to cover something up during those 3 hours and charge you with obstruction of justice.

I have asked them to change the latter behavior repeatedly, explaining why it could be a problem for users, and all I ever hear is 'good point, we'll look into it' even though there's no reason that information should be stored.

RCS has been around since 2013 and the only alternative client to Google Messages was your device maker's app that was allowed to tie into Google Messages via a device vendor only API (but essentially these were just a skin for Google Messages).

Google has not provided any public API for RCS, and they control the ecosystem fully. If Google wanted other clients to use RCS as a platform, there would be public APIs that Signal, iMessage, Textra, Facebook Messenger and other SMS clients could integrate with.

I have never had any problem distinguishing between encrypted and unencrypted communication sin signal because they put a giant padlock icon next to the name of the contact. Now I have to use 2 different apps to handle messaging and set up a different color scheme or something to provide a visual cue about which is which if I respond to a notification in a hurry.

> They're a good way to give life status updates to a lot of friends at once, and provides a good conversation starter.

I've found with experience that whenever you share something, it needs to be deliberate to chosen people, otherwise it deteriorates into popularity seeking and least-common-denominator feel good spam. I much more prefer the "take photo/video or find a meme, send to specific people each time" flow. With snap, it takes a few seconds to choose, because contacts are sorted by recency. This is the only part of snap I'm using, and it existed before stories.

Signal ended up somewhere inbetween, where you have to create a story (an imo unnecessary layer of i direction) and then add people to the story, which is minor from a tech perspective but huge issue for UX. It increases the friction for this flow.