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Comment by schvenk | Hacker News Reader

(Original author here) I agree with everything you said. SMS is popular for excellent reasons that are hard to overcome at this point. I wrote the article not because I expect it to create a behavioral shift at scale, but for the folks who, if they knew more, might care enough to do something—who agree with me that while sticking with SMS is easier than switching, maybe the benefits of switching are great enough to justify it.

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Since you're here, I really dislike the opening paragraph:

>Suppose you had two choices when chatting with your friends. The first will give you a great messaging experience, but you’ll need to sign up for a new app to get it.

The problem is, that totally misses the actual friction point. It's not just that YOU have to do this, but so would ALL of your friends. Given how salient the rest of the post is, I'm certain this was intentional, and so it turns me off as a reader immediately because you are opening with something so disingenuous.

I take your point. It wasn't intentional in terms of hiding the truth; it was intentional in terms of opening with something strong and not too nuanced. I had hoped getting into the nuance a couple paragraphs later would suffice, but given your comment I've updated the article with a hint of it up front.

And as I argue in the article, it's not essential that ALL your friends switch. Most of us deal with fragmented communication in one form or another (unfortunately). I'm probably 20% email, 40% iMessage / SMS, 30% Telegram, 10% a smattering of other things. It's not ideal but it is reality and, if nothing else, I think starting small is an effective switching strategy.

The problem I have is that no matter what, the decision to use something besides SMS/iMessage is going to be a decision to use more than one messaging app. Even if you are a great persuader and are able to get all of your friends and family to switch to your new app (which is never going to happen either), you are STILL going to need to use SMS for all sorts of things (new contacts, businesses, etc).

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