Comment on Signal downloads spike in the US and Yemen amid government scandal | TechCrunch

• HK65@sopuli.xyz ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

  IIRC it’s because US cell carriers don’t charge as much as others for sending and receiving SMS

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  • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

    That makes sense, SMS is essentially free here.

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    • echodot@feddit.uk ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ 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.

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      • mholiv@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ 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.

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      • HK65@sopuli.xyz ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ 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.

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      • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ 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.

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      • Sabata11792@ani.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

        I remember my parents flipping shit over a $0.50 fee for a handfull of messages before text was unlimited.

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  • EncryptKeeper@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ 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.

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