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.
Comment on Signal downloads spike in the US and Yemen amid government scandal | TechCrunch
HK65@sopuli.xyz 4 weeks agoIIRC it’s because US cell carriers don’t charge as much as others for sending and receiving SMS
EncryptKeeper@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
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.
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 4 weeks ago
T9 made this way better.
HiTekRedNek@lemm.ee 4 weeks ago
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!
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.
echodot@feddit.uk 4 weeks ago
It still expensive to use your phone abroad that hasn’t improved
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.