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sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 4 weeks agoNot in the US, pretty much nobody uses it here. Which is really odd to me, since it’s so prevalent elsewhere.
HK65@sopuli.xyz 4 weeks ago
IIRC it’s because US cell carriers don’t charge as much as others for sending and receiving SMS
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 4 weeks ago
That makes sense, SMS is essentially free here.
echodot@feddit.uk 4 weeks ago
It is elsewhere now it’s just in the past it used to be stupidly expensive to send SMS.
It’s way 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.
mholiv@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
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.
HK65@sopuli.xyz 4 weeks ago
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.
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 4 weeks ago
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.
Sabata11792@ani.social 4 weeks ago
I remember my parents flipping shit over a $0.50 fee for a handfull of messages before text was unlimited.
EncryptKeeper@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
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.