Why Do People Still Text
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Like others, email is my "check it sometimes" medium. Text is sort of more-immediate-but-annoying-sometimes.
I personally am digging Telegram. You sign up via phone number which texts you an MMS which then registers your account.
At that point you can create a channel, add people, invite people, create ad-hoc groups, search conversations. You get all the MMS abilities, emoji, inline images, videos, you can record quick audio notes, snap pictures. It reports when the message has been read, you can adjust notifications, etc etc.
There is the web app as well as desktop apps so I have it wherever I am. Messages are encrypted and secure, no prying eyes.The problem is that Telegram is a 3rd party service, and I have to fight people to get them to sign up and try it because they are so bent on their built-in phone texting.
Rather than describe how things "should be" I'll just describe how they ARE.
Almost nobody texts me, and those who do I will only describe as less computer-literate. Texting is probably the easiest thing for them to figure out how to do on a smart phone. Email might be 100 fold more difficult for them to master.
My most frequent contacts I've got on Telegram now, which I use 90% of the time from the Windows app.
I have like 6 email accounts so I don't use notifications. I check it when I check it. I get almost no personal messages. I get either work stuff, client stuff, marketing, or newsletters and other info. Sometimes family members will send a group message or something but email is barely personal in my world.If I had my way, Telegram probably beats out email. This mainly due to the way email still sucks at group conversations. There is a lot of "email etiquette" people need to learn to make email effective. You give Bob from church your email and suddenly he's forwarding every political activist meme he's ever seen to you. You give your email to Sally and now you're suddenly on some city-wide MLM group sales newsletter which is impossible to ever escape from.
These things don't seem to happen with texting because there is something about texting that is less, shall we say "automated". You don't get text "newsletters" and spam doesn't seem to be a huge issue. You don't typically "forward" texts so a lot of email etiquette issues are resolved.I don't see email replacing what texting does, but neither text nor email do very well with group conversations either, which is where the next network comes into play. Most everybody else who isn't my core Telegram group or email connect, does their thing on Facebook. Ad-hoc "group" conversations start there when family posts something. And the odd message comes in too.
I don't know what is the ideal system to use. We kind of have to use whatever everybody else uses who we want to stay connected with.
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Exactly - getting people to use something new is challenging at best, impossible at worst.
My mom only calls, texting would blow her mind (and make my phone explode, so I'll never teach her).
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@Dashrender said in Why Do People Still Text:
Exactly - getting people to use something new is challenging at best, impossible at worst.
My mom only calls, texting would blow her mind (and make my phone explode, so I'll never teach her).
I had the opposite. If she called I would be stuck for 45 minutes and my ear would have 1st degree burns.
She learned how to text and then I can casually deal with her over time. The only problem, she texted small books and autocorrect ruined everything.
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@guyinpv said in Why Do People Still Text:
@Dashrender said in Why Do People Still Text:
Exactly - getting people to use something new is challenging at best, impossible at worst.
My mom only calls, texting would blow her mind (and make my phone explode, so I'll never teach her).
I had the opposite. If she called I would be stuck for 45 minutes and my ear would have 1st degree burns.
She learned how to text and then I can casually deal with her over time. The only problem, she texted small books and autocorrect ruined everything.
I have that problem too. She calls, there's an hour gone.
Though the idea that texting gets rid of 'dealing with it right now' issue, at least for some. Personally email is the ultimate form of "it can wait." A phone call is an indication that something needs to be handled right now, a text is somewhere in the middle.
I guess one good thing, my kids will never post complaining about how their father called and wasted their time - oh wait... I don't have kids
While I appreciate Scott's take that trying to contact him via a single device connection (phone calls or SMS) aren't good for him since he doesn't carry his phone always - the idea that email is somehow instant access to him is something I can't grasp.
I'll be extreme here - if Scott's father was in an accident - does he want an email about that? or does he want a phone call about that? I suppose a message on any number of messaging platforms (other than SMS) would be nearly as good as a phone call, but then as I write that, if the device he is on can get messaging, it can probably get email - and I have to ask... are all of his devices constantly chiming whenever an email is delivered? -
Ran into a new one today... battery was getting low and just before being able to plug in the phone, the charging port got wet. With many modern phones, charging, at least my normal means, requires that the port be completely dry. Towels, a hair drier, a really dry environment, tissues, etc. can all assist in drying out the port. But often it will take hours at best to be able to charge again. Even with absolutely nothing going wrong with the phone, normal usage can cause text messaging to be unavailable for many hours. And if I were, say, camping somewhere humid it might be days without being able to start charging the phone.
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And at the same time @mary had her phone run over in a parking lot and because it was the weekend, it took a few days before she was able to get texts again. Minor issue, but highlights the risks in the real world. That meant that for those days, any 2FA requiring her phone was unavailable to her as well.
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@scottalanmiller said in Why Do People Still Text:
And at the same time @mary had her phone run over in a parking lot and because it was the weekend, it took a few days before she was able to get texts again. Minor issue, but highlights the risks in the real world. That meant that for those days, any 2FA requiring her phone was unavailable to her as well.
All quality solutions that require 2FA also provide one time use codes or similar to get in. It is your responsibility as the user of 2FA to know how to get into your systems when the main 2FA key is gone.
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There is only one option besides texting, and that's email.
The reason for that, is because there is not another single platform everyone uses where personal preference is not a factor.
For example, with phone and email, it does not matter your provider. You can send a text from t-mobile and receive it on any other carrier really, or send an email from yahoo and receive it on Gmail.
This is not the case with anything I can think of without putting much thought towards it. If you send a message from Facebook messenger, the other person HAS to have it as well.
I know there are some things like message to text and whatever, but that's besides the point.
I did not read all 360 replies, if this point was made already, I don't care.
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@JaredBusch said in Why Do People Still Text:
@scottalanmiller said in Why Do People Still Text:
And at the same time @mary had her phone run over in a parking lot and because it was the weekend, it took a few days before she was able to get texts again. Minor issue, but highlights the risks in the real world. That meant that for those days, any 2FA requiring her phone was unavailable to her as well.
All quality solutions that require 2FA also provide one time use codes or similar to get in. It is your responsibility as the user of 2FA to know how to get into your systems when the main 2FA key is gone.
Problem with that approach is that you would need your backup codes to be as quick and easy to use as your 2FA system. This does a lot to heavily defeat the safety of 2FA if you are always carrying and having access to static codes.
In this case, she was traveling when it happened. So carrying codes with you when traveling makes them super risky. You don't want them on paper in your pocket, for example.
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@Obsolesce said in Why Do People Still Text:
There is only one option besides texting, and that's email.
The reason for that, is because there is not another single platform everyone uses where personal preference is not a factor.SIP technically works that way, but almost no one enabled it. But yes, this is effectively true. Email is the universal tool here. Even SMS requires that you go through a carrier, so it is more like Facebook in a lot of ways, than like email. You can't host your own SMS and talk to other people with SMS. It's actually a closed system, whereas email is open to the entire Internet.
With email, you can get access from any device, anywhere. At least optionally you can. With texting, you have to have your provider (like Facebook) agree to provide you access. And they can give away that access as they often do. There are multiple SMS companies, but they all share a closed backbone (PSTN) together, but you are tied to them. The Internet seems comparable, but it really isn't. You can use any provider, not just the one that you are currently tied to, and it's a democratized system, and you aren't tied to a device or account, and what small centralization is necessary is controlled carefully (domain and DNS systems.)
SMS is also unencrypted, email is optionally encrypted.
Nothing is perfect, but email has some significant advantages over SMS.
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@scottalanmiller said in Why Do People Still Text:
@JaredBusch said in Why Do People Still Text:
@scottalanmiller said in Why Do People Still Text:
And at the same time @mary had her phone run over in a parking lot and because it was the weekend, it took a few days before she was able to get texts again. Minor issue, but highlights the risks in the real world. That meant that for those days, any 2FA requiring her phone was unavailable to her as well.
All quality solutions that require 2FA also provide one time use codes or similar to get in. It is your responsibility as the user of 2FA to know how to get into your systems when the main 2FA key is gone.
Problem with that approach is that you would need your backup codes to be as quick and easy to use as your 2FA system. This does a lot to heavily defeat the safety of 2FA if you are always carrying and having access to static codes.
In this case, she was traveling when it happened. So carrying codes with you when traveling makes them super risky. You don't want them on paper in your pocket, for example.
That would be stupid. Backup codes are not needed to be quick and easy access. They are for backup access purposes, not consistent access.
Most of mine are in LastPass stored as a note with the account password, as you need that information also when you try to log in, and I sure as fuck don't know most of my passwords.
Backup access to LastPass is available multiple ways if the 2FA device is gone.
Once you gain access, you disable 2FA until the device is replaced.
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@JaredBusch said in Why Do People Still Text:
That would be stupid. Backup codes are not needed to be quick and easy access. They are for backup access purposes, not consistent access.
Exactly. So in cases where you lost a phone temporarily, it creates a problem, like it just did, where you may not have access to backup codes with you.
As a production admin, having access to systems at a moment's notice is a pretty big deal. Going even half a day without access can pose a bit of a problem. But always being prepared to work around failed 2FA at a moment's notice is also a problem.
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Texting also poses problems for anyone that has a personal assistant or needs to hand work to a team. If you have a secretary, email and other modern communications generally have mechanisms where they can work with your email, respond on your behalf, pre-filter for you. To do this with normal texting mechanism, you would need to have your secretary have your phone rather than getting your messages on his computer, phone, or whatever.
For a lot of professionals, that's a big deal. They need someone to handle their messaging for them. Sure, you can simply give out someone else's number as your own and have texts go only to someone else, but that's not a good solution either for almost anyone. Button line, the normal, expected options that you use for business communications generally break when you use texting.
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We used a texting service with a SIP trunk recently for a business texting line. The service was expensive to make SMS available via a web console. But because the customers could not identify to whom they were speaking, and because we could rarely identify the customers, and because we could not identify who on our side was speaking to customers, and because customer responses just went blindly to "the company" so no one was sure what they were responding to or about, we had to stop it as it was crippling our ability to support anyone that texted us. It had its handy moments, but basically once you scaled past a team of two or three people it rapidly become impossible to use.
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@scottalanmiller said in Why Do People Still Text:
Texting also poses problems for anyone that has a personal assistant or needs to hand work to a team. If you have a secretary, email and other modern communications generally have mechanisms where they can work with your email, respond on your behalf, pre-filter for you. To do this with normal texting mechanism, you would need to have your secretary have your phone rather than getting your messages on his computer, phone, or whatever.
For a lot of professionals, that's a big deal. They need someone to handle their messaging for them. Sure, you can simply give out someone else's number as your own and have texts go only to someone else, but that's not a good solution either for almost anyone. Button line, the normal, expected options that you use for business communications generally break when you use texting.
First things first - I Don't consider SMS a business solution, and I'm guessing many people don't either.. though, sadly some do, nothing I can do about those people.
Second - if you buy into the apple ecosystem, you can get SMS messages from a single number on multiple idevices, it's not great, but it would be a solution.
back to your point - I definitely agree that email is the solution for a real business solution in this case. No chat app has solutions for this specific problem that I'm aware of either... Perhaps there is one that allows you to forward/BCC a second party to a stream for a given time period, but that will definitely not be as flexible as email is.
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@Dashrender said in Why Do People Still Text:
Second - if you buy into the apple ecosystem, you can get SMS messages from a single number on multiple idevices, it's not great, but it would be a solution.
Google does this too, but it's extremely anemic and requires that the receiving device still be active. If the device turns off, loses signal, or gets damaged.... it appears that you still have service, but it stops working and you don't know that people can't reach you.
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@Dashrender said in Why Do People Still Text:
First things first - I consider SMS a business solution, and I'm guessing many people don't either.. though, sadly some do, nothing I can do about those people.
Business and personal are not really dramatically different use cases. Personal is more "forgiving" of bad design, but is still affected by it. If it's not a good business solution, it's not a good personal solution. And that you need two solutions is itself a problem (business people are still people.)
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@IRJ said in Why Do People Still Text:
In that case, it was a third party system that just happened to use SMS somewhere. It's the database that was the exposure, not the mechanism.
Although I've worked places where scorpions were deployed so that all texts were recorded without permission, including those from other companies. Anyone working at GE headquarters, for example, had their phones compromised over the wireless.
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Do I expect an 8 - 24 hour response
email
Do I expect a 5 min - 2hr response
text
Do I need to talk to someone this instant
call
Do I want to see if casual acquaintances want drinks
Social media message
I feel like the platforms are used to communicate unspoken expectations.
