Why Do People Still Text
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@Carnival-Boy said in Why Do People Still Text:
You can get a dumb Nokia for, like, 20 bucks in Europe. I assume it's the same in the US. We have one that gets used everyone time a family member breaks their phone, which is quite regularly. It's also handy at festivals where you don't have to worry about theft or power to charge it (the battery lasts about a week!)
Problem is, lost SIM card, lost communications. And you have to keep buying and managing them. Yes, there is a solution to spend money, have an extra device, and muddle along to send/receive under limited circumstances. But it requires...
- Another solution for managing contacts.
- Another solution for maintaining message history.
- Another solution for handling lost messages during the transition.
- Keeping a second phone with you at all times.
- Never leaving a jurisdiction where they can instantly replace your SIM card with the same number.
- Spending extra money to solve something that shouldn't need to be solved.
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@Dashrender said in Why Do People Still Text:
This is an excellent point. Mary should have just gone to Walmart and purchased the cheapest phone available if SMS was the only form of communication that she enjoyed.
You could say the same thing about her email. Unlike the phone, you don't have to buy something, you just borrow anyone else's.
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@Dashrender said in Why Do People Still Text:
But seriously? SMS and SMS only? I suppose, if you're millennial enough you might refuse to use email. She used no other form of communication what so ever?
She's Gen X, but never worked in an email environment. Too old to have had it in schools, work types that never had it at work.
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@Dashrender said in Why Do People Still Text:
Now if all of this is to say that the only way Scott had to get in contact with her was via SMS - perhaps they weren't that close, and up to that point, Mary never felt it important enough to provide Scott with secondary forms of communications.
My guess is that she turned on 2FA so lost access to her email. She has NTG email, but couldn't access it either BUT the messages were waiting for her when she got back to a machine.
Very rural, I know her wife doesn't have a computer. I doubt her wife's family does.
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@Obsolesce said in Why Do People Still Text:
@Carnival-Boy said in Why Do People Still Text:
Maybe she just came up with a cunning excuse to avoid Scott? We’ve all been there!
There is no excuse. Someone only being available via sms when there's a hundred other options, or refusing other methods isn't worth the effort IMO. Maybe if someone is in a 3rd world country and simply does not have a single other option, even the cheapest 90's flip phone not available in an emergency, or during natural disaster... Then sure, temporarily i can see.
Getting the phone isn't the thing. It's getting the contacts from the phone and the message history.
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@Obsolesce said in Why Do People Still Text:
I know some here like to use anomalies as confirmation bias or to justify a point, but I never buy those.
Planes go down, do you still fly? I'm sure everyone here still does.
The difference is... without spending crazy amounts of time and money, everyone who texts seems to have these problems. Everyone who doesn't text, doesn't. Planes almost never crash, statistically and logically they are safe to fly. Texting, if you pay attention in the real world, doesn't work reliably and logically it's obvious why. So your plane example, if applied to texting, is my point. Logic and observation confirm that it makes no sense.
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@Dashrender said in Why Do People Still Text:
This user would have the same issue if their computer was damaged and they didn't have the funds to replace/repair it.
They did, exactly. But unlike texting, the messages and contacts were retained so that when both devices were replaced... one picked up where she left off, one did not. Texting failed where email did not.
Everyone is repeating what I'm saying
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@Dashrender said in Why Do People Still Text:
Someone who relies solely on SMS for communication and doesn't have the funds/knowledge to replace their device at nearly the drop of a hat - why are you doing business with them?
You are really not used to dealing with poor, rural parts of the US. Growing up in poor, rural NY and having lived in the actual third world, I can tell you it is often far more difficult to do things in the US because there is an absolutely expectation that you will always have excess access to funds, support networks, and resources. But in the third world people around you are all used to the struggles of lacking resources and there is more planning and handling of it. Your expectations of what anyone can "just do" is based on not a high level of affluence, but a world view that doesn't allow for a lack of a low level of affluence. But the US has that, on a large scale, just like anywhere else. And rural NY is one of those areas.
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@Obsolesce said in Why Do People Still Text:
@scottalanmiller said in Why Do People Still Text:
More horror stories of texting. So @mary again, because once you start having texting problems you are more likely to have more of them. This time, just days after getting her phone replaced from the pool incident and having been out of contact for two weeks and losing all of her communications during that time... she had a massive electrical issue in her house that took out absolutely everything that was plugged in, including the new cell phone that was charging. Because she'd already had several phone issues, the phone company would not replace the phone and she had to wait on insurance which, because of the holidays, took a few weeks. So she has been effectively out of contact for nearly a month, immediately following a two week stint. Being tied to a phone makes texting very risky for continuity of service, even in the US. Now she finally has a phone, and she only can reach me because I knew that if something had happened that texts do not automatically get received if the device has been offline, so I was texting daily for a month and as soon as she had a phone she got that text, but none of the ones I sent even just over the weekend. Those texts are just lost.
If this was email, those messages would have been waiting for her. And if she was completely offline we'd have gotten a bounce back. And she could have accessed them from another device.
In this case, USPS would have been best lol
That is a sentence that does not exist in my world...
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@scottalanmiller said in Why Do People Still Text:
@Dashrender said in Why Do People Still Text:
Someone who relies solely on SMS for communication and doesn't have the funds/knowledge to replace their device at nearly the drop of a hat - why are you doing business with them?
You are really not used to dealing with poor, rural parts of the US. Growing up in poor, rural NY and having lived in the actual third world, I can tell you it is often far more difficult to do things in the US because there is an absolutely expectation that you will always have excess access to funds, support networks, and resources. But in the third world people around you are all used to the struggles of lacking resources and there is more planning and handling of it. Your expectations of what anyone can "just do" is based on not a high level of affluence, but a world view that doesn't allow for a lack of a low level of affluence. But the US has that, on a large scale, just like anywhere else. And rural NY is one of those areas.
I get all of that, I was actually really mostly just being melodramatic.
But yeah - I have dealt very little with the extremely poor. But as you said, in doing so, I would fully expect an alternative to be in place for situations exactly as you mention - i.e. not relying as something as completely unreliable as SMS. Instead, you'd have an email address already setup as the main, even if not instantaneously available (though often it would be), solution.Instead you and they find themselves stuck in a horrible setup with zero communications because they don't have the ability to fix their SMS problem because of lack of funds. They didn't take the planning you mentioned into account before this situation occurred.
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@Dashrender said in Why Do People Still Text:
But yeah - I have dealt very little with the extremely poor. But as you said, in doing so, I would fully expect an alternative to be in place for situations exactly as you mention - i.e. not relying as something as completely unreliable as SMS. Instead, you'd have an email address already setup as the main, even if not instantaneously available (though often it would be), solution.
Which then begs the question... why use a service that requires all of that, when you could get all aspects of it, better, by simply not having it?
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@Dashrender said in Why Do People Still Text:
Instead you and they find themselves stuck in a horrible setup with zero communications because they don't have the ability to fix their SMS problem because of lack of funds. They didn't take the planning you mentioned into account before this situation occurred.
"Planning" to protect against data loss with SMS can only mean: not having SMS at all. Because the people sending you information have no way to know when SMS starts to fail, it doesn't tell the sender. And the recipient never finds out. So even when SMS appears to work (both parties get messages sometimes) it is an unreliable system that tends to leave both parties never sure what data is lost. In a case like this, she only knew that she lost a month of messages because I told her.
So when SMS fails, you are stuck, because messages keep going there, but you can't retrieve them. There's no good protection against that other than stopping it in the first place.
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@scottalanmiller said in Why Do People Still Text:
@Dashrender said in Why Do People Still Text:
But yeah - I have dealt very little with the extremely poor. But as you said, in doing so, I would fully expect an alternative to be in place for situations exactly as you mention - i.e. not relying as something as completely unreliable as SMS. Instead, you'd have an email address already setup as the main, even if not instantaneously available (though often it would be), solution.
Which then begs the question... why use a service that requires all of that, when you could get all aspects of it, better, by simply not having it?
That's a great question - you'd have to ask your person why indeed?
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@scottalanmiller said in Why Do People Still Text:
@Dashrender said in Why Do People Still Text:
Instead you and they find themselves stuck in a horrible setup with zero communications because they don't have the ability to fix their SMS problem because of lack of funds. They didn't take the planning you mentioned into account before this situation occurred.
"Planning" to protect against data loss with SMS can only mean: not having SMS at all. Because the people sending you information have no way to know when SMS starts to fail, it doesn't tell the sender. And the recipient never finds out. So even when SMS appears to work (both parties get messages sometimes) it is an unreliable system that tends to leave both parties never sure what data is lost. In a case like this, she only knew that she lost a month of messages because I told her.
So when SMS fails, you are stuck, because messages keep going there, but you can't retrieve them. There's no good protection against that other than stopping it in the first place.
You're not telling me anything that I haven't been preaching to people for 20+ years of texting/paging. It's not a reliable system.
And while email has more reliability in it - it's has zero timeliness ensured. Because of that complete lack of timeliness, I don't understand you disdain for phone calls in cases of emergencies. Phone calls either work right now or they don't. If you're the one in an emergency - if the person you call doens't answer right flippin' now, you call someone else, if they don't answer, call someone else, etc. Email doesn't give you this instantaneous response setup like a phone call does.
Now sure - anything less than an actual emergency can and maybe should go to email or another ensured delivery form of communication (slack perhaps? not sure if it ensures delivery).
But back to your "planning" bit - clearly there was no planning in case of your associate because they only had SMS as a communication option, which we all agree with, is a failure.
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@Dashrender said in Why Do People Still Text:
And while email has more reliability in it - it's has zero timeliness ensured.
Same with SMS, in the real world I never see email delays over a few minutes. But see hours on SMS with some frequencies.
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@Dashrender said in Why Do People Still Text:
I don't understand you disdain for phone calls in cases of emergencies. Phone calls either work right now or they don't.
Right, but because so often they don't. And even when they do, it's often just to give information that is still needed in an email. Phone calls are fine as an alert only, but almost never as the primary point of contact. Because what emergency situation, especially in business, can you do purely over the phone? What emergency requires no direct information, can go to just one person, can be relaying accurately over voice, doesn't need to be forwarded, doesn't need to the documented, is okay if the person doesn't answer, and doesn't require any security?
Telling you that the house is on fire? Sure. But whether you are telling someone about a system outage or you are telling them that you are trapped in the trunk of a car, email is more likely to get the necessary information out to more people, more quickly, than a phone call. Phones calls are great, when they work. And useless when they don't. Emails work even when someone stepped away to get coffee or went to the bathroom.
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@Dashrender said in Why Do People Still Text:
But back to your "planning" bit - clearly there was no planning in case of your associate because they only had SMS as a communication option, which we all agree with, is a failure.
Right, SMS being a failure is the point. Planning around SMS has to result in not using SMS at all. So that gets back to the original point - SMS should be avoided.
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@scottalanmiller said in Why Do People Still Text:
Telling you that the house is on fire? Sure. But whether you are telling someone about a system outage or you are telling them that you are trapped in the trunk of a car, email is more likely to get the necessary information out to more people, more quickly, than a phone call. Phones calls are great, when they work. And useless when they don't. Emails work even when someone stepped away to get coffee or went to the bathroom.
This makes a huge assumption that someone is basically sitting on their email all day every day. I'd say most people are more likely to be sitting on their phone all day every day than their email (you being the obvious exception). I have notifications for emails/non SMS chats disabled on my phone. The stupid device would never shutup otherwise, and basically would simply become white noise that would be ignored. And while SMS has all the failings you've mentioned - the ringing phone is the one most likely to get my attention the quickest. Email would only match that if I was in my email at the time the message arrived.
All that said - in a delayed notification situation, I completely agree that email is likely best - though chat clients that tell the sender that a message has been read is something I like a lot more than relying on email read relies, which most people disable (just stating a personal appreciation of that tech)
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@Dashrender said in Why Do People Still Text:
This makes a huge assumption that someone is basically sitting on their email all day every day. I'd say most people are more likely to be sitting on their phone all day every day than their email (you being the obvious exception). I have notifications for emails/non SMS chats disabled on my phone. The stupid device would never shutup otherwise, and basically would simply become white noise that would be ignored. And while SMS has all the failings you've mentioned - the ringing phone is the one most likely to get my attention the quickest. Email would only match that if I was in my email at the time the message arrived.
If all those emails would be SMSs instead, then you'd have that silent as well and never know it... but double never know it due to how unreliable SMS is, and you'd never know.
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@Obsolesce said in Why Do People Still Text:
@Dashrender said in Why Do People Still Text:
This makes a huge assumption that someone is basically sitting on their email all day every day. I'd say most people are more likely to be sitting on their phone all day every day than their email (you being the obvious exception). I have notifications for emails/non SMS chats disabled on my phone. The stupid device would never shutup otherwise, and basically would simply become white noise that would be ignored. And while SMS has all the failings you've mentioned - the ringing phone is the one most likely to get my attention the quickest. Email would only match that if I was in my email at the time the message arrived.
If all those emails would be SMSs instead, then you'd have that silent as well and never know it... but double never know it due to how unreliable SMS is, and you'd never know.
I completely agree - I don't think anyone is defending SMS here.
