Are Text Messages the New Social Media? One Startup Thinks So | Hacker News Reader

Are Text Messages the New Social Media? One Startup Thinks So

nytimes.com

31 pointsmirthlessend27 comments

I'm not interested in talking with Brands, Companies, or Celebrities. How utterly disgusting. This is just a means of exploiting parasocial relationships.

Every time I see a Brand on Twitter acting like a real human I'm sickened to my core. You are not a human, you are a disembodied entity pretending to be human to make people buy something.

It should be illegal for companies to act like humans and issue communications. If you need someone to issue communications find a human willing to take on that job and send all messages through them as a representative. Let's stop pretending corporations are people.

>a Brand on Twitter acting like a real human

>send all messages through them as a representative

Not sure what you're getting at. Everyone knows that some social media person/intern manages the corporate Twitter account. How would them sending mails or text messages signed with their name be any different eventually? But maybe it doesn't really matter for much longer anywAI.

I've been the social media person (community manager) for a few large companies: HTC for a few years, a Google account for a bit, then more recently for Qualcomm. At least for the larger companies in general that I've worked with, "interns" never touched post copy. Outbound "posts" are typically written by a group of people outsourced to an ad agency, approved internally, then approved by the client, then scheduled to be posted. Typically dozens of people are involved for a single tweet.

Companies (at least the ones I've worked with) take their social media handles as "official" messaging from the company that could easily effect stock prices if incorrect messaging is shared. I once had a colleague incorrectly share that a budget smartphone was going to receive the latest version of Android (at the time) and several tech news sites picked up on it.

Direct replies to users is a bit different. Typically a response is drafted in a tool like Sprinklr then approved by a second person.

> Every time I see a Brand on Twitter acting like a real human I'm sickened to my core. You are not a human, you are a disembodied entity pretending to be human to make people buy something.

Huh? Those messages are written by employees. Those employees are humans. This is the basis of customer service and it’s nothing new. The salesperson at the grocery store checkout is both human and communicating on behalf of their employer.

> The salesperson at the grocery store checkout is both human and communicating on behalf of their employer.

I think this is true in the abstract, obviously the people at the checkout are part of the experience of the store, but they're also completely separate from that entity. When I reflect on the cashier at my local store, I don't think of their specific behavior as reflecting on the entire brand. If the cashier messes up the readout of the total, I don't understand that as my local supermarket making a mistake but rather as a specific mistake of a specific person.

That separation disappears if we put the brand up as a facade and don't interact with the person underneath, like we don't with brand accounts on twitter.

This is interesting. I suppose also which position they hold matters. If a chat-based customer service agent was rude to me I would consider this a reflection of company behavior -- but I reached out to someone who is supposed to actually be an active representative of the entity (customer service/technical support).

But the person who turns around an iPad for me to swipe my card may not fit as a "representative of the entity".

I think GP's point is that when you are interacting with Wendy's social media account, you aren't talking to Wendy herself, you are talking to Sheryl the Wendy's Media Associate. Hiding that actual interaction is uncanny.

I follow a lot of company accounts. Mostly news orgs but also tech ones that I'm interested in. Even the personal accounts I follow are experts in one thing or another. Twitter was founded as some lame attempt at public, personal communication but it's far more useful for broadcasting.

Please don't. Text/SMS is one protocol we have absolutely no control over. I really wish it remains the least attractive medium for people and companies to use. I wish it stays for the mandatory banks, and other institutes to use it to send us updates of our accounts, and other details.

Emails - I can create filters, mark-as-spam, unsubscribe, or even label them. So, I'm OK being in the spam battle and contribute to the war against spam.

WhatsApp and Other apps - all of them have become the best medium of spam for corporates and everyone, who wants to win quick, fast, and dirty. At-least, I can have some form of sanity that I can block numbers, report, and mark as Spam etc.

>> “we have like 45 percent click-through rates and 98 percent open rates,” Mr. Kutcher said.

I have to think these metrics are BS or just wrong.

There is no way enough users have read receipts turned on that they can legitimately claim to track a “98% open rate”

Yeah, 98% sounds suspiciously like a delivery rate to me, not an open.

Twilio also reports "the typical open rate for SMS is 98%" though they give marketing messages an average of 82%.

My best guess is that the open rate is so high because people clear notifications by opening texts. You also can’t unsubscribe without opening.

I get an automated message from my phone provider every month letting me know that I auto paid my bill. I always open it to clear the notification even though I know exactly what it is.

Social media is underdefined buzz word. Anything is social media. Nothing is social media. Is sitting on the toilet reading messages while taking a shit the next big thing? My bowels seem to think so, and one startup agrees!

https://twitter.com/Dadsaysjokes/status/1173674848587005957?...

https://web.archive.org/web/20230423100954/https://www.nytim...

FTA: But what sets Community apart is the dialogue that celebrities and brands have with their customers, who provide troves of information about themselves, which the brand owns and isn’t shared with Community’s other clients.

Oseary was originally drawn to Community because of his role as a music manager, he said.

“I have no way to know who came to the concert tonight. I have no way to speak to them again once they leave the concert. I have no way to know who bought the album,” he said. “With Community, once they text the number, we now have a way to stay in touch directly. And that information is not owned by anyone but the artist, the talent or the person who’s building a business.”

And SMS solves this because…the user took an action by accepting text? What?

I think this is fascinating, another ‘social media’ company, now with some serious management that is focused on celebrities and brands. This sounds super faddish. But I guess I will have “Ashton Kutcher’s” phone number in my contacts now, so…I’m cool! Hold up gotta text McDonald’s back…I can see ChatGPT used here…

I go to concerts to see bands, not talk to music managers. There's a reason why nobody stays after to chitchat with the head of marketing.

F these guys. It's the start of Text spam, after that pretty much we will be seeing ads 25/8 nonstop. This is how the apocalypse happens.

It's 2023 and we're talking about typing words on a tiny mobile keyboard...

What a dystopian place we live in now. The ideas are all so backwards and underwhelming... Typing text in your phone only serves to help data collectors in transcribing the information you share, self snitching in pure form. It's not going anywhere useful or good for the average person.

LLM chatbots are going to make typing words on a tiny mobile keyboard a lot more common in the near future. That’s going to annoy a lot of people, because slate smartphone keyboards universally suck.

My PinePhone’s mechanical keyboard is a step up in this regard, but not perfect.

This is confusing to me. It's an old and open protocol, I don't see it's continued use as dystopian. If you want to worry about something, worry about Google and apple's repeated attempts to man-in-the-middle attack SMS by hijacking it and sending it through their servers instead of by SMS.

With voice to speech and predictive text I can write text on my tiny mobile keyboard pretty fast with good enough accuracy for correspondence type messages.

I can do this from anywhere on Earth and I won't have to bring a heavy laptop. Every pound I can cut helps when I have to travel.

That said I usually bring a small laptop when I travel, but it usually stays in my luggage unless absolutely necessary.

Funded by Ashton "Chat control" Kutcher.

No thanks

I suppose the best thing about this is it's opt-in only. I can ignore all brands phone numbers and get on with my life. Just the way I like it.

Readable non-paywalled https://archive.is/PYlvG

What an advertorial.

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