The phone that almost ruined my social life | Hacker News Reader

The phone that almost ruined my social life

cnet.com

16 pointswalterbell6 comments

It would be great to learn what caused the software to behave like this. Could be that it thought she intended to continue the conversation? I remember the phones at the time having a "conversation over SMS feature", which never seemed to work for me :)

Otherwise, text only without emojis is really lacking. There are numerous cases on HN, that I have observed, where irony/sarcasm/joking is misconstrued and people react badly.

Not bothering that much that I would want emoji support, though :)

It was probably intentionally done by a dev or product manager who didn't understand the implication of elipses in the American market...

Even though I read these sentences as "trailing off" and ending awkwardly, others (and especially in different countries and/or with different languages that have their own "textisms" might read it as, say, more friendly...

One example that comes to mind is in-game chat for many videogames, where your text is preceded by "<name>: "...Westerners will write out the full "smiley face":

  NoobSlayer420: :)

Whereas Russians will write just the "smile" portion, possibly with extra for sarcastic emphasis:

  УбийцаНубов420: )))))))

I had a friend and coworker who wrote everything with elipses in place of full stops...all his emails read as a stream of thought...it was very distracting, especially in a business context...Now I wish I'd said something...

I also often use the elipses to show that I am still in the process of considering the implications of the point under discussion. I had not realized that the reader might find that distracting. Thanks for your thoughts!

I think, though, that some examples from the article (e.g. "Ok...") would be interpreted everywhere as distancing. I would and I am not American :)

SMS had a limit. There was probably a branch that was supposed to truncate and add ellipses, only they mistook more than for less than so it was always truncating and adding ellipsis.

Ps. I think you need to travel more.

> I think you need to travel more.

What do you mean?

ok...

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