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Signal downloads spike in the US and Yemen amid government scandal | TechCrunch (techcrunch.com)
submitted 2 years ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[–] 5 points 2 years ago* (9 children)

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.

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  • [–] 4 points 2 years ago (3 children)

    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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  • [–] 2 points 2 years 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!

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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    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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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    It still expensive to use your phone abroad that hasn't improved

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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago

    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.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years 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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