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> But still, why do people prefer sending chat texts instead of calling or video calling? Surely not because of tech

It turns out that people who are highly fluent in a language with a compact alphabet like English prefer sending text chats. My Chinese colleagues and friends routinely send many more voice chat messages than text because it is much more efficient than typing mandarin.

Also in India, I've observed that people fluent in vernacular but not in written English primarily send voice chat messages - again because the vernacular text input is very inefficient

So interestingly does my daughter who can type English text easily but as she always grew up in a world her parents and her friends parents had smartphones, she finds it a lot more comfortable to send voice chat messages.

The other benefit of chat is asynchronocity. You're not forcing the other party to do a context switch and signalling that they can get to ot.

No, GP is right, for a simple reason: look at your input devices. A keyboard and mouse/touchpad combo is most effective at interacting with text. The story would be entirely different if the main interface was e.g. a stylus. A instant messaging service that sends hand written scribbles instead of text follows much more naturally from that.

This is why fax machines persist in Japan.

Some of us are on a desktop computer, all of us are on a mobile phone.

You do realize how cumbersome that mobile keyboard is right. With a click of a button, you can record audio and/or video.

But still, text messages rule them all.

Who sends texts on desktops anyway? A small minority.

No. A lot of people record voice messages, but they need to be in an environment providing enough privacy. But messengers emphasize text heavily in their UIs - again because of keyboards. Keyboard less touch devices are too novel an innovation compared to when instant messaging was cast into its final form.

> but they need to be in an environment providing enough privacy.

Yet another argument in favor of text.

Just an argument against audio and video. With a stylus instead of a keyboard you can still scribble amd draw naturally. That was my original example.

Wikipedia's List of codecs page (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_codecs) is a good example of the explosion of complexity that arises when representing media digitally.

To this day, this complexity is still mostly offloaded to users in the form of export settings, and supported playback formats. One basic requirement of the technology reaching the point good media support is if a user never encounters codecs, in either export settings or playback problems.

My kids have no idea what a codec is. Still they record and play videos and audio messages all the time.

I don't know in which world or time you are living, it's been a long time since I touch anything related to codecs.

This is a fair point, there's a lot you can get away without worrying about the complexity today, and that amount is certainly steadily growing (which is great!).

But particularly on the creation side, if you say, try and combine a vector created in one program with a bitmap created in another, you'll likely encounter some issues (e.g., color profiles), or taking an animation created in one program and overlaying it over a video in another, you'll often need to know your codecs. Or exporting a video optimized for social media, e.g., videos shared on Instagram and Twitter often have heavy compression artifacts.

I'm really looking for seamless creation and sharing freely combining media from different programs, with the same ease as cut, pasting, and editing text. (As well as interfaces that are as easy to use as manipulating pen and paper with your hands.)

> Why do people prefer sending chat texts instead of calling or video calling?

This isn't universally true. I (unfortunately, for me, since I hate it personally) know plenty of people who prefer voice or video calls. I even have people who will reply with voice recordings to my text messages.

Many people prefer voice or video.

I prefer text because of two main reasons:

1. Its asynchronous. I can reply as needed while not being disturbed if I happen to be in the middle of something.

2. Its not real time. That is, I can take my time to form my response. I can proof read, edit, clearly form my thoughts etc. In a voice/video recording, editing is difficult, in a live setting, I'm under more time pressure to finish my sentences rather than thinking about them more.

I don't prefer text because of technology reasons, except those that make text more asynchronous and easier to proof read and edit.

But many people I know or have interacted with hate text and prefer voice or video.

There's a lot of selectivity happening on this post. Nobody here has worked in an office where the management prefer video calls instead of Slack messaging? I've seen no shortage of people on HN argue that this kind of text-based communication is inferior to video calls or screen shares when solving tech problems.

It seems pretty obvious to me that text, video, audio, and images are good for different things, and that diversity is reflected in the ecosystem. There isn't a universal trend towards or away from text, not really. People are making fewer voice calls, but they're also consuming more content on Youtube instead of on blogs. They're also moving a lot of their social life onto platforms like TikTok and Instagram, which are primarily video/image.

I don't see a universal trend here in either direction. I think people are cherry-picking a couple of isolated trends or points and making really broad, generalized statements that aren't warranted.

The whole idea of picking a "best" medium here is silly anyway. It's childish, in the same way that people used to argue about whether books, movies, or games were the 'best' artistic medium. Different mediums are good for different things.

Actually I would argue that people send texts despite it often being highly inefficient. It often takes an infuriating amount of text messages to agree on something that would only take a 2min call. It's just we're so used to sending chats.

Chat has other advantages. Lets say you're trying to agree on a restaurant for dinner:

- If I'm busy right now I don't need to stop what I'm doing to answer the call, or you don't need to try again later.

- Need 2 minutes to look up your schedule and suggest a time or find a restaurant? That's fine, I can do something else until you reply and you don't feel like you need to rush the process.

- 6 hours later I forgot which restaurant we agreed on? It's ok, just open the chat, it's right there.

- The chat is searchable, if 2 months later I don't remember the restaurant name I can probably find in a few seconds by searching some related keywords like "food", "restaurant", "dinner", etc.

This depends on the people involved. I find most of my programmer friends prefer text in most circumstances, but most people in sales, marketing, accounting, HR and management that I've worked with tend to prefer voice, video, face to face. As do people in other industries (eg my mother loves voice and video and while she does use text a lot, mostly to talk to me, often finds it tedious).

This is why my default is text until a call becomes obviously better. "Where do you want to go for dinner?" ten messages of hemming and hawing, "Call me when you're free". A call forces an interruption on the person, or a game of phone tag. Texting can be answered when each person is able, and can be used to coordinate the call.

Don't tell Gimp that it's easy to draw a circle...

In my case because of the asynchronous nature of text versus vide or voice calls. An effective compromise is voice notes in modern messenger systems, which preserves asynchrony while also allowing the expressiveness of speech.

There's an entire dialect of English that has evolved just to handle expressiveness in text formats. There's a standard and reproducible grammar, and most people (who do or have spent any time on the internet in the last 15 years) use it a second language. Messenger services allow the flexibility of asynchronous communication with the added benefit of synchronous communication when it's important (that's why it's preferred often to email, for example).

Voice notes, like email, are fully async and require actually listening to someone talk, which changes the communication media that you're working in.

Messaging has risen to the prevalence it has because of the features it brings to the table, not in spite of them.

Imagine you have to communicate something precise to me and I am stuck in a meeting:

- you send me a picture, it may be ambiguous;

- you leave me a voice call, I have to go out of the meeting room to listen to it

- you write a message, it just works. If there is info to use, I will easily copy your message in any application (Excel, Word, SAP...).

Also, text can be stored easily, so I will keep an archive of your text, probably far less an archive of your voice message or diagram, as they are very heavy.