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It's time to stop texting

dfeldman.medium.com

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Re: It's time to stop texting

#21

Post by 310260 »

johnea wrote: post #12

email still rules! In every way described in the article. The fact that socially, one is "laughable" is really a laugh at the tech illiterate. A good email client and server, offering instantaneous message transfer and notification is infinitely more secure and functional than any "messaging" "app". A tech savvy person can easily run their own mail server, or migrate their history from one vendor to another. Try that…

I get what you're saying but the UI and UX of email is a wreck and a half even with a good client.

And simple-but-powerful applications like messaging should appeal to the lowest common denominator if they want to be effective and usable.

Re: It's time to stop texting

#22

Post by einpoklum »

> The first ... will give you a great messaging experience

Already sounds suspicious.

> you’ll need to sign up for a new app to get it.

Sign up? Sounds like somebody is running a centralized server that's tracking me then.

> The second ... sometimes fails to deliver messages without telling you

It tells me when the message cannot be sent. I don't like it that some central authority knows what's the status of my correspondent.

> send tiny, blurry photos and videos;

It won't, since I won't send any of that stuff. In messaging, a word is worth a thousand images.

> only works on your phone (not your computer);

good, that means no centrally-managed identity.

> confuses all your friends

I have yet to meet a person who gets confused by receiving a text message.

> and might lose all your messages if you switch phones;

As opposed to _not_ losing them? Now _that_ would be terrible. Although I'm sure the government in my country keeps a copy anyway.

> limits the length of your messages;

Yeah, that's kind of annoying.

> makes some of your friends feel inferior to others

Because they, umm, got an SMS? I don't understand.

> and offers no privacy whatsoever.

Well, that's true, but also not much of an illusion of privacy either.

...

Anyway, I'll keep my text messaging, thank you very much.

Re: It's time to stop texting

#23

Post by [deleted] »

schvenk wrote: post #2

Just published. Abstract: Suppose you had two choices when chatting with your friends. The first will give you a great messaging experience, but you’ll need to sign up for a new app. The second requires no sign-up, but sometimes fails to deliver messages; sends tiny, blurry photos and videos; only works on your phone; confuses all your friends; and offers no privacy whatsoever. That choice is real. And if you’re like…

[deleted]

Re: It's time to stop texting

#24

Post by Groxx »

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…

> your phone number is yours

Unless you move out of their service area. Or a number of other caveats. Then they're not required to allow you to port your number, and telecoms rarely do anything user-friendly-but-internally-costly that they're not legally required to do.

Re: It's time to stop texting

#25

Post by _yb2s »

This is silly, most people have never even heard of Signal or Telegram, and only 25-50% of my contacts have WhatsApp. I could either immediately message anyone over fast and reliable SMS, but I should instead ask them to install some app first?

Moreover, despite all of the hate, iMessage actually works great. If the other person happens to have an iPhone (as most of my contacts do), they automatically get all these modern features, and if they don't, it seamlessly fails over to SMS and just works without anybody needing to think about it.

Re: It's time to stop texting

#26

Post by theonlybutlet »

Rayhem wrote: post #19
nerdjon wrote: post #10

I understand the concerns that they are bringing up, but I feel like saying just download another app completely misses the point of my SMS is so popular. It is just... there. It does what I need it to do without standing in my way of communicating. It is also a standard that is not at the whim of a specific company shutting down a major service (that I am aware of) to continue communicating. I struggled for a while…

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.…

In the rest of the world the answer is simply Whatsapp. China it's WeChat. No need to discuss. You can also see if their contact is in the app.

Re: It's time to stop texting

#27

Post by nerdjon »

Rayhem wrote: post #19
nerdjon wrote: post #10

I understand the concerns that they are bringing up, but I feel like saying just download another app completely misses the point of my SMS is so popular. It is just... there. It does what I need it to do without standing in my way of communicating. It is also a standard that is not at the whim of a specific company shutting down a major service (that I am aware of) to continue communicating. I struggled for a while…

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.…

> The impoverished

I am a bit mad at myself for not even thinking about that. I know people who still use flip phones and this basically segments them out even further.

I think we just need to look at AIM, MSN, whatever yahoo's was called. I think there is a good reason that those were very quickly replaced by just SMS. Even though I would argue that in many ways those were superior to SMS and had features that we really did not get until iMessage (for better or for worse) but we already went through this once and SMS won out.

Re: It's time to stop texting

#28

Post by mrweasel »

smcin wrote: post #20
torben-friis wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> (and millions of others worldwide) Where else do SMS remain common? At least here in Europe they've been relegated to automatic communications, like receiving 2-factor codes. No one uses them for messaging. I think the app of choice is different per country, but I haven't met any non American that's still used to SMS.

That's simply untrue. Tens or hundreds of millions of people in Europe still use SMS, for messaging. If you're trying to say X% of people under the age of Y tend to use WhatsApp(iMessage/IG/SC/Telegram/Signal) for messaging, then what are X and Y? and in which European countries (it varies).

Pretty much anyone communicating across platforms, iPhone to Android or the other way, is using SMS. As you say, it varies from country to country, but also from social circles.

Because SMS has been basically free for 20 years in some market, it's not something people felt a need to migrate away from.

Re: It's time to stop texting

#29

Post by 310260 »

Listen, SMS sucks (and by extension MMS which is what manages the media sending) but universality trumps all. It's a simple system that despite all its flaws is still available everywhere and used for everything. It's an "innate" technology. Being innate is a feature far more powerful that stickers and read receipts.

RCS is a great standard to replace it but SMS is so ingrained that it wouldn't be gone even with RCS on every phone and every operator interconnected.

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