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Comment by Vinnl | Hacker News Reader

This is really hard to do. I don't live off the grid by any means - there's a million ways to contact me, e.g. text message, calling, Signal messages, emails, etc. However, I don't use Whatsapp in a country where the vast majority of people does.

I'm fine with missing things if people don't feel like using any of the methods I have to get in touch with me. However, instead of either not bothering or using one of the communication channels we have in common, people tend to ask my partner to relay messages to me. So short of starting to use Whatsapp (which I'd really rather not do, and which requires installing a different OS on my phone - and possibly get a data subscription as well), the burden is on my partner to either tell them to contact me directly, or to relay the messages.

Any good tips for others ways of dealing with this are very welcome.

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It's a social cost question, I guess.

Your signal: I don't care enough about our communication to use WhatsApp, because of reasons that are obscure to 99% outside a tech community. Similarly, they don't bother to reach out to you on other communication channels, because they don't bother enough.

The important thing to understand is, from your communication partners point of view, you create a burden without reason, so they work around it in (their) most effective way.

I've been there and didn't support this or that messenger. By now I think, the only way to solve those kind of issues are i) sane laws that regulate privacy and communication security, and ii) trends that create a need for a new communication style - private, secure, and human (like, calling from time to time, find a better solution to ghosting, things like that).

I'm convinced that we need positive incentives for that, instead of creating artificial burden.

Oh yes, I wasn't trying to imply that any party was at fault here - just that the outcome is unfortunate.

This isn't just limited to communications tools. For example, people might have dietary restrictions for non-health reasons (religion, environmental impact, etc) that others do not share or even understand. I don't mind accommodating those (to a limit) e.g. when picking a place to eat, but it is a burden placed on people around them. That's just the way it is, I guess, and I suppose all people can do is try to minimise the burden, and to be accepting of those placed upon you.

One needs to work on explaining the reasoning to the others in one's group, and providing tech support so they too can embrace the freedoms one enjoys

> The important thing to understand is, from your communication partners point of view, you create a burden without reason

They create a burden without reason.

I think that both sides create a burden. In my opinion, the difference is that, it is a one-to-many kind of matching scenario. One person (the one opting out of using the preferred messaging method of all their friends) creates a burden to many people, while all those people create a burden just for one person.

If it helps, you can try visualizing it as a fully connected graph that initially has equally weighted edges between all nodes. But then the weight of all edges connected to one specific node goes up by multiple factors. That node loses out much more than all the other nodes.

> I think that both sides create a burden. In my opinion, the difference is that, it is a one-to-many kind of matching scenario. One person (the one opting out of using the preferred messaging method of all their friends) creates a burden to many people, while all those people create a burden just for one person.

I personally rather observe various groups in society with very different kinds of preferences.

He was making a point about empathy that you seemed to miss.

Perhaps I missed this point - but if the empathy point exists, the other side did not show empathy, either.

You're creating extra cognitive load for people. If there's one thing behavioral psychology has reliably taught us (in spite of the repeatability issues on a few findings), it is that our brains are wired to avoid cognitive load as much as possible.

The cost of putting cognitive load is many people will choose not to pay it and that cost is instead borne by your partner

Would you walk through wet mud if a grass or concrete alternative path is available? That's pretty much what your contacts are doing

Another metaphor: if someone decided not to pave their driveway, because they don't want it to get so hot in the summer, would you tell them, hey I'm not going to visit you until you pave your driveway?

In practical life, people who chose to live in less accessible places actually don't get visited much except by very close relatives & friends (I can think of 4-5 of my relatives like this). So probably proves the point :-)

Depending on how deep you want to go down the rabbit hole, you could bridge WhatsApp to Matrix using the web client and whatsapp running in an emulator - https://www.matrix.org/blog/2019/02/26/bridging-matrix-with-...

Not a solution for even most people unless you're really into Matrix and running your own servers though. (I bridge WhatsApp, but use a physical phone to do so)

And then take it a step further with something building on matterbridge[1], which has libs to "bridge between mattermost, IRC, gitter, xmpp, slack, discord, telegram, rocketchat, steam, twitch, ssh-chat, zulip, whatsapp, keybase, matrix and more".

[1] https://github.com/42wim/matterbridge

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