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Comment by muzani | Hacker News Reader

My problem isn't with email or Slack. It's with WhatsApp and Telegram. It's the official channel for many things now, except it's not one channel, it's 50 or so. Wedding invites, family dinner invites, everything goes into there. They look no different to the overembellished spam about how (insert race) puts AIDS blood in our butter.

REALLY IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENTS regarding my daughters' exams and schooling etc are in Telegram as well, sometimes WhatsApp. Some schools are well aware of the problem and have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars developing an app that isn't even an app, so now we have to head into yet another app-site to pick up the kids and get updates on schooling.

The good thing about Discord at least is I can be sure to ignore 100% of it and opt in any time I like.

The thing about emails is if I get too much spam from someone, I can unsubscribe. Same with social media. But I can't just block the gullible spammer uncle.

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> Some schools are well aware of the problem and have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars developing an app that isn't even an app, so now we have to head into yet another app-site to pick up the kids and get updates on schooling.

Our local school seems to switch apps every year, steadily getting worse with each update until this year when they switched to something that's the least-bad of the lot.

Every time, I start thinking to myself: maybe I can just fucking write an app for them to use that wouldn't be a usability nightmare. But then I come to my senses, and realize that I absolutely don't want to maintain an app for a single customer, set up email, sms, etc., store data safely in compliance with the various regulations. So I just go back to grumbling.

For a moment I think, maybe I'm exaggerating. So I open up Telegram.

I wish HN allowed me to drop images, but basically, there's this "NEW SCHOOL TRANSITION" channel for my daughter who's switching schools.

95% of the channel is just user join spam. Yesterday someone dropped several PDFs. The title of these files is something like OZ36824106181121.pdf

Wtf is this file? I open it and it's a list of textbooks to buy. The school shop is open 29 Dec - 5 Jan, except in weekends. But some groups are to buy these books after 20 Jan. Am I in that group?

There is no CTA - do I need to buy this and when? We have a textbook borrowing scheme. Does the new school not do textbook borrowing?

This is not my only child. This is how DBTC gets me.

Yea whatsapp is just a cognitive overload nightmare. Everybody is now scheduling important stuff there, inbetween unstructured spam and whatnot, its the worst channel of them all.

You cant search properly, you cant flag or filter, the desktop apps are just slow and shitty, basically the whole thing is not optimized for productivity at all.

I can feel you. I tend to ignore WhatsApp messages at all or take up to 2-3 weeks to respond (as soon as I'm in the mood for it). People around me know that and mostly just call if they want something. Problem solved (IMHO).

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