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this post was submitted on 27 Mar 2025
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The chat space is problematic.
This contributes to a fragmentation that makes WhatsApp the app that-you-must-have
Sure it is supposedly encrypted but I would not bet my money that is without back doors
Whatsapp to messengers is what internet explorer was to browsers lol. Slow, bloated, unfree, universally hated, but still somehow universally used
Ain’t that the truth
I mean honestly, feature wise, it's pretty good in my opinion. It has some very useful features Signal lacks (e.g. live location sharing) and it's not slow or badly designed in my opinion.
I still prefer Signal since I don't like Facebook, but realistically speaking WhatsApp is pretty good.
Not in the US, pretty much nobody uses it here. Which is really odd to me, since it's so prevalent elsewhere.
IIRC it's because US cell carriers don't charge as much as others for sending and receiving SMS
That makes sense, SMS is essentially free here.
It is elsewhere now it's just in the past it used to be stupidly expensive to send SMS.
It's wjere text speak came from, I believe they used to actually charge by the character so if you wanted to tell somebody you'll "be at the train station in 15 minutes" that's quite a lot of characters, so that became "@ stn n 15" which is almost incomprehensible these days.
When WhatsApp became available everybody went over because suddenly you could communicate like humans, after the phone company's realized that the jig was up they lowered text prices but by that point everyone had gotten used to just using WhatsApp. Then Apple came along with iMessage and no one could see the point because it only worked on iPhones whereas WhatsApp work for everyone.
Text speak mostly came from typing on dumb phone number pads to enter text. Like if you wanted to type “hi” you would have to enter “4-4 pause 4-4-4” As you might expect 5 putting presses with a pause between some of them just to say “hi” got painful. Thus the shortening.
Text messages were always charged per message. But each message was limited to 160 ascii characters or less if you were using other encodings. You could send 1 character or 160 characters but it cost 20 cents (at least where I grew up) either way.
This is all separate from l33t speak which is a whole different thing.
T9 made this way better.
Oh yeah, I remember realizing my new razr had that and started going text crazy.
I felt the same way the first time I discovered swipe-to-type on a smartphone! 🤣
I'm not sure why this had 0 votes, but it's true. I'm old enough that my first cell phone experience was a bag phone from the 1980s.
Texting wasn't even a thing for a while, but once it started, it was charged per message with like a 16 character limit. Then that limit was expanded, but it was always per message, not per character.
But, actually typing out a message was a pain the ass. There were no keyboards at first. You used the letters on the number pad to send your messages.
When T9 texting debuted that was a GOD SEND. Only needing to tap a lil number once to guess your word? Holy crap!
That is if you stay within one country. I still get some insane charges if I text someone 60 kilometers away because it's international.
It still expensive to use your phone abroad that hasn't improved
It did actually. I don't pay for sending a message or calling my neighbour if I go to the next country or Bulgaria. The EU made it law that roaming is free.
What still costs money is if you send a message in the NL to the NL if you have a Belgian number for example, which makes it so that you still have to get a new number each time you move countries. Or rather the bigger pain is calling my mom who lives in a different member state, that I can't really do without incurring insane charges.
We did the same here (US), but I guess texting got cheaper faster than in the EU? Because free text was generally a thing before smartphones really took over. Another interesting metric might be data costs, data was super expensive for a long time, while texting was essentially free, so I think people just didn't want to switch to an app like WhatsApp. Data is pretty cheap now, but I guess the culture never really changed.
I remember my parents flipping shit over a $0.50 fee for a handfull of messages before text was unlimited.
That’s definitely part of it, but I think a bigger contributor is iMessage. iPhones have a dominant market share in the US and iMessage has been the gold standard for a long time and it doesn’t even use the SMS system.