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Comment by xenospn | Hacker News Reader

I've hated phone calls all my life - I still dread making them today (and I'm a 40 year old man). I will literally miss extremely important business opportunities because I put off calling someone for too long. Texting and emails are life savers for me, and if people tell me "they're not the texting type", I'll simply disengage.

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I don't understand why businesses don't use text messaging services exclusively. It's asynchronous and convenient, everything is recorded in writing, privacy and encryption are now standard features, we can have helpful automation that isn't a pain to interface with... It should be possible to do everything over text message.

> I will literally miss extremely important business opportunities because I put off calling someone for too long.

They will also miss important opportunities because they refuse to adapt.

> I don't understand why businesses don't use text messaging services exclusively.

You miss so much context when communicating in text.

Being able to hear the tone of someone's voice and quickly course correct when they are headed the wrong direction is invaluable for many things.

That said, I agree that for many situations text is very convenient. I am very happy every time I need to contact customer support and find they have a chat service available.

In my opinion, text is a great way to start almost all interactions. Being able to upgrade from that to voice is super helpful in many cases. Screenshare is also great for a lot of things.

And yet, it's probably the top medium for flirting and establishing romantic relationships...

I would almost speculate that's precisely because of the limited bandwidth that text provides.

When starting a relationship, one of the most important things at first is to "not come on too strong". The other party misses out on all your social cues and tells, which probably makes the exchange feel less vulnerable.

Further, since you know hardly anything about the other person at the start of a relationship, text lets you conveniently project your own emotions onto the other person without their tone getting in the way.

> The other party misses out on all your social cues and tells, which probably makes the exchange feel less vulnerable.

This is precisely why Tinder never worked out for me. Not seeing someone truly react to what your saying, just the filtered reply to it. Every conversation felt stale and awkward.

Because asynchronous communication takes a long time and often misses important emotional information transmitted via voice.

I am not a slow writer, but for many things I prefer to have a phone call as I find it significantly easier and quicker to clear up any potential misunderstandings.

I get that there are people that prefer text over voice and I do try to accomodate depending on preference, but if I have to have a proper conversation that may get a bit technical its simply quicker to call.

When conversing business matters, I don’t need to convey emotional information. The biggest advantage asynchronous text communication gives is I don’t have to waste time on hold. The next is that I have a record of who said what.

Bingo. The only instance where I prefer phone calls over text-based communication methods is when I just want to talk about nothing with family members who live far away and who I haven't talked to in a long time, just so I could hear their voice. For anything functional, I prefer text-based methods all the way for a multitude of reasons. Having full logs of the conversation to reference later on is a huge boon when it comes to avoiding misunderstandings and getting things done.

Easy. It’s a low fidelity, moderately effective means of communication that is in writing.

Talking and making a deal or agreement to be formalized in a long form is clear to all parties.

I'm in exactly the same boat. 40 years old and hate phone calls. But recently I've started to learn that the reason I hate them is because it always feels like I have to "prepare" for them and that's something I'm putting on myself. two things have started to change the way I think about them: 1) being in a call centre job where someone made it policy to stop reading the ticket before calling. this made it feel less important to have all the answers before calling and taught me that my preparation was only effective about 30% of the time. it also taught me how to politely stall or think out loud - the person on the other end in almost all cases is fine with the fact that you are human and don't know the answers immediately. 2) when I left that job I found my way into a completely different role, but one where my manager was a big proponent of making calls when things weren't working. For example if you've sent email after email waiting for someone, pick up the phone and call them - it triggers a completely different response. It's like they remember you're another human and not just a task to be done. You can quickly clarify any concerns or questions they have, and it genuinely helps move things forward. Couple this with lesson one, and not overthinking what I'm going to say it's made a big difference. I still hate calling, but between those two lessons I've become much less hesitant to pick up the phone because it can really change the course of a relationship or interaction.

I can relate. I had a pretty significant stutter growing up. Nothing, and I mean nothing, I hated more than having to pick up the phone. I always made it a point to be as far away from the dreaded phone as I possibly could (just so that I wouldn't be expected to pick it up when I was nearer to it than everyone else) when inside the house. Once my little sister figured out that I had this weird speech impediment, she would run up to the phone every time she heard it ring. My parents wanted me to face my fears - they meant well - but man, what a horrifying experience that would be ! The ceremony I had to put on just to utter the word 'hello' still gives me nightmares. I've long since grown out of my stutter but talking over the phone still isn't something I look forward to.

As a 33 year old I really am confused by this statement.

While I love my texting, slack, etc, nothing replaces the low-latency engagement (intimacy) of a one on one phone call. I can parse someone's tone very easily on a phone call. Text rarely conveys such depth.

>nothing replaces the low-latency engagement (intimacy) of a one on one phone call.

For a lot of people, texting absolutely does replace the intimacy of a phone call. I have an ex-girlfriend who almost never talked to me on the phone, and only wanted to text, and she was like this with all her friends too. Note the "ex-" part here...

I struggle with phone calls. I find them quite anxiety inducing with anyone who I don't know well. I think because I find it hard to read tone of voice accurately, and to control my tone of voice to accurately convey my emotions.

I generally much prefer in person contact. And messaging to arrange it.

Also: not sure if you are young enough to be in the MSN generation? But a good chunk of my generation (I'm 26), grew up spending every evening conversing via text for a chunk of our teenage years. We got pretty good at conveying emotion through text (using longggg words... elipsis for pauses, emojis, and idioms (lol, lmao, AF), etc)

I'm also 26, and I definitely relate to the teenage IM experience. I think the problem with phone calls is that it's an unnatural level of focus to give someone you don't know well. when you meet face-to-face, there's always some little distractions available to fill the gaps in the conversation. silence is way worse without context; after fifteen seconds or so, the other person will say "hey, are you still there?" I also find myself missing one word out of every other sentence the person says, so there's a lot of backtracking.

as an aside, I've noticed that my cohort of people who grew up sending hundreds of messages/texts to their friends every night don't really interact that way anymore over text. back then if the person was online, they would usually respond immediately and you could exchange a lot of information really fast. now every response seems to take a few minutes or an hour (I do this myself too, don't mean to blame anyone). it has the weird effect of making text a less useful way to communicate than it was ten or fifteen years ago. I guess when everything is immediate and urgent, nothing is?

> as an aside, I've noticed that my cohort of people who grew up sending hundreds of messages/texts to their friends every night don't really interact that way anymore over text.

Yeah, same here. Don't have time for that anymore! I also have the freedom to go an see people in person in a way that I didn't back then (well not currently, but most of the time!).

It's even worse for me if I know the person.

Yeah, I'm only a couple of years younger than you and I feel the opposite. I'm always trying so hard to parse the words and meaning, that I easily miss the sentiment of spoken words.

It's one of those things that I realize is probably just on my end though. I've had speech issues since I was a kid and am technically on the autism spectrum. I've learned enough by now so that most people wouldn't guess either of things - but real-time streaming audio processing is one of the few things I just can't learn or accommodate for. It's like I'm always 3 seconds behind in understanding what was just said. Often, I can even recite back what was said to me before I can parse it. I'm surprisingly fine at highly technical conversations / phone troubleshooting though - because it's easier to anticipate the path of the conversation and sentiment isn't usually a factor. Taking tons of notes helps too.

From my experience, text can absolutely convey a significant degree of intimacy - but it takes a great deal of practice to do so fluidly. There is some latency - but the trade-off works to my benefit since I don't have much more latency than my peers on average.

Phone calls are just terrible when you try to convey complex information. Just recently had that issue with a business deal where it only became clear that we were not on the same page w.r.t. some important details after I put things into writing after an IRL meeting and several follow-up calls. The lesson from this is always to follow up with a summary e-mail, and to avoid anything more complex than a simple yes/no or maybe arranging a time and date by telephone.

Depends on what info I need. For most colleagues I'll just need some quick non-emotional information to do my job. Calling them up just takes up time.

Same goes for clients calling about an issue and trying to stay on the line while I fix it. It's just inconvenient in that context.

Hearing someone is great when I need to discuss some opinions. Or when you really need live interaction.

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