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It's time to stop texting

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Re: It's time to stop texting

#161

Post by vidanay »

TylerE wrote: post #107
Rayhem wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, this feels a lot like saying "My god, people, stop using telephones! Facetime has video! And the bitrate ! It's a million times higher! It's 2023, why would anyone use a POTS call?!" Sure, nicer technical specs are...nice, but they're a far, far second to solving a problem. In an sms world: Problem: I need to contact a new acquaintance. Solution: Exchange phone numbers because everyone has them. Text. Or call.…

Kind of a bad example. If I could have a TRUE pots phone, I'd jump on it. Instead all you can get it psuedo-POTS jammed over VoIP. Real POTS in the old days was actually kinda magic. You never had the "everyone talking over everone else" thing you get with any VoIP solution because you don't have a syllable or two (more if using cell) of hidden latency. Other than the audio rolling off everything above about 3.5khz,…

I absolutely love the frequency roll-of! It's very nostalgic to me.

It's one of the reasons I love the move The Vast of Night. The audio for the whole movie sounds like it was run through a perfect band pass filter.

Re: It's time to stop texting

#162

Post by stbede »

I don't care if SMS goes away for good, but whatever replaces it should be a different universal standard that can/will be implemented by carriers. I'm not going to purchase a smartphone just so that I can use a fancy messaging app when my current phone already has sufficient messaging abilities.

Further, if SMS is completely turned down (and not replaced) so that there is no text messaging service for non-smartphone devices then I'd rather be without messaging capabilities than have to get a smartphone.

Re: It's time to stop texting

#163

Post by hulitu »

SMS is not for fotos and videos. For that you have MMS. And security ? Facebook can read my WhatsApp messages, Google reads everything on my phone so ... industry state of the art.

Re: It's time to stop texting

#164

Post by sowbug »

digitallyfree wrote: post #113
josephcsible wrote: post #16

There's one gigantic advantage to SMS that no alternative app has come close to matching: your phone number is yours, so even if Verizon decides to drop you as a customer, you can move to one of their competitors and still be able to receive messages from everyone you could before. If you use WhatsApp and Meta decides to ban you, you're out of luck unless you gave a second means of communication to everyone you used…

Meta, Google, etc. also sometimes randomly ban accounts for reasons unknown (AI detecting "suspicious" behavior, etc.), whereas I have never heard of phone companies doing this.

Follow the money. What an attention-funded company calls "suspicious" behavior is what the phone company calls "revenue-generating" behavior. That's why my carrier seems to be utterly unable to stop spam callers (who generate revenue for them), whereas it's been nearly 20 years since I've had an email spam problem, thanks to Gmail and the businesses that pay Google to support it.

Re: It's time to stop texting

#165

Post by FalconSensei »

alanbernstein wrote: post #96
_dain_ wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>confuses all your friends who exactly is confused by SMS?

I'm assuming this is referring to utterly broken iphone/android group messaging.

why utterly broken? Would't iPhone just use SMS in this case?

Re: It's time to stop texting

#166

Post by dusted »

It's time to stop using that one actual protocol that every phone has native support for, don't need ANYTHING but you having a phone subscription and is not a walled garden or in the hands of a single organization? Yes that sounds totally reasonable, given the many excellent alternatives.

Re: It's time to stop texting

#167

Post by LordDragonfang »

pessimizer wrote: post #50
ariehkovler wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> only 25-50% of my contacts have WhatsApp In many countries, EVERYONE has WhatsApp. In Israel it's how your boss, your work team, your kid's daycare, businesses and government offices communicate with you.

It's not ideal to give Facebook that much control over communications.

This happened well before Facebook bought them. The solution should have been to not allow the most popular instant messaging platform in the world be bought by a company whose revenue is based on spying on their customers. Unfortunately, the US has had functionally no antitrust action in the past several decades, and what little it has now only exists based on political affiliation.

Re: It's time to stop texting

#168

Post by LordDragonfang »

jawns wrote: post #100

There are two things that keep my wife and me tethered to Google Chat as our primary means of texting each other: 1) Search. This is the big one. The fact that I don't even need to differentiate between email and chat when I need to search for something is highly valuable. Plus, its search functionality is just in general very solid. Go figure. 2) Integration into GMail. During the workday, it's more convenient for m…

I went all in on Google Hangouts back around 2010, and made everyone close to me switch. Ten years and ten Google messaging apps later, when Hangouts sunset "officially for real", I let my contacts choose what protocol we used. I mostly just use Discord now (with some Signal for techie friends).

Google was perfectly poised to be at least the second biggest player in the messaging space, and they squandered their lead over and over.

I refuse to trust Google to sustain a product that isn't their core focus again unless they make some major changes how they treat the product lifecycle.

>Search.

...broke when they switched, by the way, so now you need to manually search in a different place for any older message.

Re: It's time to stop texting

#169

Post by tshaddox »

Rayhem wrote: post #159
tshaddox wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Yeah, this feels a lot like saying "My god, people, stop using telephones! Facetime has video! And the bitrate! It's a million times higher! It's 2023, why would anyone use a POTS call?!" Sure, nicer technical specs are...nice, but they're a far, far second to solving a problem. I understand that this is supposed to feel like a clearly ridiculous example but my gut reaction is "well yeah, I hate the telephone and I…

It's something of a clearly ridiculous example and I'm sure a lot of people (myself included) would prefer using more modern solutions 99% of the time. However, I suspect that when you tell most people that also means their 911 calls that basically cannot fail by law now also need to work on Discord or whatever they'll at least take a minute to think about the implications.

911 calls are pretty clearly a special case that is obviously worth pointing out if someone is advocating for literally dismantling the entire telephone system without a very good proposal for replacing the 911 system. That would be a much more extreme position than simply disliking routine (especially unsolicited) telephone calls and preferring than most people in society default to another form of communication.
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