(unpaywalled version on archive.today: https://archive.ph/03cwZ)
Interesting figure that comes out of the article: 87% of US teens prefer iPhones. Also the explanations given aren’t quite surprising, I guess it’s mostly because of iMessage. Teens will feel like outcasts if they get an Android phone while their friends still use iMessage because of the green bubbles.
It’s actually hilarious how we allowed consumerism to take us this far and that we have now peer pressure over smartphones.
“You’re telling me in 2023, you still have a ’Droid? […] You gotta be at least 50 years old.”
ouch 😔
The thing is it’s a specific standard that just hasn’t kept up, you shouldn’t be married to any software, and you should be able to decide yourself what you use, I can’t change what big tech does with their software, but I can call people stupid for not using the ability of their computers to run custom software.
I despise the trend of people not realizing what they legitimately can do with their hardware, because they were just too scared to install software. I so often stumble upon people who can’t accomplish simple tasks because they are terrified of installing software, and this messaging thing is definitely one of these issues.
Essentially if you are given a library of software, and you have a problem that is solved by installing software, why would you not install software, it’s mostly free, and requires only the briefest thought about what you want and where you can find it.
You’re entirely missing the point. Communication systems ought to be standardized and mostly has been. You’re acting like you can magically install apps on your relatives and friends phones if you want to.
I have zero fear of installing incredibly custom software and honestly do so most days…
Not sure how someone this intelligent can so easily get lost on the idea that communication happens on a network, not on one device, and therefore standards help interoperability… It’s sort of bizarre
Yes I can’t do shit about communication systems not being standardized to the degree I’d like and with the features I’d want.
So what I try to do is try to bully people until they use an app that everyone can be relatively happy with, SMS is essentially the only one I don’t accept because it’s 20 years old and doesn’t behave sensibly for the modern area.
I can understand that standards help interoperability but realize that for SMS, obviously that has failed because apple has rejected RCS for now and developed a default experience that is better. I don’t control any of that shit. I can just tell people to install chat apps if they want to talk to me. And I can bully them if they don’t.
The network is a network of communicating software so the standard can be installed by default or after the fact, it doesn’t make a difference if everyone would just install software. Being angry at apple or WhatsApp or whatever for not writing a messenger you like is sorta stupid, they are companies they’ll never do what you want, being a angry at users that refuse to use options freely available to them can at least improve the situation for me because they can install what I, or they want to use.
At least you know you’re a bully but otherwise I can’t agree with a word of this. I’m not bullying my mom into using an app because her photos are shitty res. It’s rude and pointless. It won’t work. Also if it did I’d still be an asshole but an asshole providing tech support for a new thing. Being a bully is a bad thing fyi
Well if someone is stupid and my bullying gets them a bit out of their stupidity I don’t think it’s too bad. Also this is largely not a problem where I live, my mom asked if we could use signal because she disliked WhatsApp because of privacy, and I just installed signal, my dad still uses WhatsApp, my friends and I use telegram and discord. I’ve actually never had to do any real bullying because in the real world everyone understands the issue enough for us to get somewhere sensible.
It’s neither rude nor pointless to explain software to users who are less adept with software, sometimes it won’t work but, it also sometimes does just work, especially with chat apps, it’s literally just replacing an icon, because on the UI side they are very similar. And I hate to tell you this but not providing tech support if you are good at it also just doesn’t help, it just makes us collectively stupider. Sure don’t burn yourself out on users who can get nothing right, but like teach your parents colleagues and friends some fundamentals that you seem to understand, if only because it makes your life easier.
It sounds like the idea of empathy is repellant to you. Bye.
I’m not sure how you come to this staggering conclusion, an honest attempt at teaching is completely impossible without empathy, but yes it sometimes involves conflict, the important thing is to be patient, and invest what you can give into people you actually care about. I would hope that includes your parents, but I understand it might not.
I’m just going by the sustained use of “bullying”. If I had my way, I’d use signal with everyone, but I’m not going to ask 20 people to change for me whether it’s superior or not.
Besides, I am much more of an idealist than that – I see using a proprietary solution as just a bandaid even if I was up for doing the “bullying”. The real solution is a decent standard for mobile texting. I think it’s coming, largely due to the EU forcing apple to stop being annoying. In the meantime I’ll just use WhatsApp when I have to and sms otherwise. Besides, there’s usually no need for me outside of crappy photo res to use anything more than SMS, and in those cases email is easy and standard enough even for my mother.
I look forward to that standard because that would mean I can choose a better app and all my contacts can too if they choose, but it would be optional. Imo that’s absolutely the way it should be.
I think I sort of see your perspective after this last message. Thanks for sending that and not being as annoyed as a standard Redditor would have been.
I think the fundamental issue left is just that I don’t accept one standard to ever be good enough for all direct message communication, I also hope EU legislation will make the situation better. But I also believe we should know our tech and use it because we have a good reason to.
In the end of the day making good open standards should probably be easier than it is. More generally I think closed tech (IP) shouldn’t exist, but neither good standards nor open tech exists in the real world unfortunately.
So as a consequence I just want people to make informed decisions to exploit what already exists in accordance with their own demands, whether I get them there by bullying or teaching or discussing is mostly just semantics to me. And if a group or person uses what seems from my perspective to be a bad tool, it is in my view a disservice to myself and them not to at least try a little to get them to use it.
Ty for the conversation as well, I had a feeling that you were actually trying to understand what I wanted to get across so I just sorta kept talking…
Generally I often notice people here are closer to me in position which makes for more interesting discussion, but it can also take quite some time to get to the actual disagreements because the disagreement are so slight.