It's time to stop texting • Hacker News Board

Re: It's time to stop texting

#201

Post by nunez » Fri, Jan 13, 2023, 4:25 AM UTC

LordDragonfang wrote: post #168

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…

to be fair, Google+ really messed them up here. Everything went to crap after Plus was attempted. I say this because Hangouts got swallowed by and subsequently neutered after Plus.

Re: It's time to stop texting

#202

Post by nunez » Fri, Jan 13, 2023, 4:26 AM UTC

daveslash wrote: post #191

nunez wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

this is kind of like tesla removing am on model 3/y it's super old and sounds like shit but it works really really well and is great for relaying critical information that we now cannot get

They did? Aw, man.... I love tuning into AM 1610 when driving through National Parks to get park information. AM is great for low-power local broadcast for recorded tourist information on repeat.

agreed. AM 1610 in Delaware is an excellent service that I can't use when we road trip there.

Re: It's time to stop texting

#203

Post by aendruk » Fri, Jan 13, 2023, 5:04 PM UTC

mnd999 wrote: post #197

aendruk wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

None of the issues mentioned under the section about iMessage? iMessage would be great if Apple allowed cross platform clients. Until then as far as I’m concerned it doesn’t exist. Sent from my iPhone.

Dick head

Not sure what I’ve done to elicit that response. Care to elaborate?

Re: It's time to stop texting

#204

Post by frankhoward » Sat, Jan 14, 2023, 9:30 PM UTC

ploum wrote: post #118

LarryMullins wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's very confusing to me that Europe seems generally skeptical of big American tech, but has evidently jumped straight into bed with Facebook's WhatsApp with far more enthusiasm than Americans.

Maybe because most of the initial success was before Facebook bought Whatsapp. Until recently, lot of people were ignoring that their whatsapp was part of facebook (but those people were also using facebook messenger anyway). Germany and Switzerland have some exotic secure messengers that were quite popular (and may still be) like threema. There was also some quite suprizing stuff. My inlaws were, until recently, usi…

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Re: It's time to stop texting

#205

Post by frankhoward » Sat, Jan 14, 2023, 9:38 PM UTC

ploum wrote: post #118

LarryMullins wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's very confusing to me that Europe seems generally skeptical of big American tech, but has evidently jumped straight into bed with Facebook's WhatsApp with far more enthusiasm than Americans.

Maybe because most of the initial success was before Facebook bought Whatsapp. Until recently, lot of people were ignoring that their whatsapp was part of facebook (but those people were also using facebook messenger anyway). Germany and Switzerland have some exotic secure messengers that were quite popular (and may still be) like threema. There was also some quite suprizing stuff. My inlaws were, until recently, usi…

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Re: It's time to stop texting

#206

Post by AshamedCaptain » Tue, Jan 17, 2023, 8:13 AM UTC

schvenk wrote: post #154

AshamedCaptain wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"No privacy whatsoever" is a bit of an stretch of an argument to make, specially when talking to the general public. You have way more privacy when sending a plain text SMS or an email than when sending a physical letter with a wax seal, and most people would argue that the latter is "private" for some definition of the word. I would even bet that any email leaks that most users would be afraid of are going to be cau…

The thing with email is it's only encrypted (even in transit) sometimes. So it kinda has the same issue as iMessage. If you're a Gmail user using Gmail's web app to email another Gmail user, you get encryption in transit (and it sounds like you might be able to implement E2EE as well). But if you email dave@somerandomemailserver.com, you won't know until you send the message whether it's encrypted. As for envelopes a…

> On the other hand, a lot more people have access to the messaging traffic and can bring scripts to bear on it at scale.

Actually, I disagree here.