Comment by PrivateButts | Hacker News Reader

Comment by PrivateButts | Hacker News Reader

This has been a constant bit of friction between my wife and I. To me, the norms are:

- Unscheduled calls are if it's an emergency or something that you need an answer to right now

- Calling twice in a row is an emergency

- SMS if it's important but not urgent

- Discord chat if it's just casual messaging or pics

This is how my family and everyone else I know communicate, but my wife. My wife will call me repeatedly to tell me that they just got out of work and are going to the store. It really doesn't help that the bluetooth in their car is trash too, so answering the call is rewards you with feedback hell. It gets me in the habit of not dropping everything to answer their calls if it's around when they get out of work, which has bitten us twice when they couldn't get a hold of me for a bit when they had car trouble and needed a rescue.

To me, personal calls operate on a reputation system since you don't know what they will be about until you're already answering them. If you burn that rep on calls that don't matter, all someone will think the next time they see you on caller id is that it can wait.

For most people, it's a fool's errand to try to change their feelings about communication channels. Some people strongly prefer voice for casual communication, and trying to change those people is like trying to convince a person that painting is better than singing. They're just fundamentally different things: Technically, subjectively, emotionally.

Of course this cuts both ways, and that creates conflict.

That sounds pretty standard: normal questions can be a chat message; when it's useful to have an answer soon then SMS or call, or check if they see the message within a minute depending on your urgency. If it's an emergency and the call got pushed away or went unanswered, of course I'll just keep calling. Pretty common sense methinks

> Discord chat if it's just casual messaging or pics

It's interesting to me that discord has become a "default" for you. For my social group, discord is only used for people I only have an online presence with. If I want to do something IRL, I send an SMS or something.

It's because it's on every device we use. Works in the browser so I don't have to install a client as well. Just was the chat tool we both used heavily at the time, and now it's got inertia.

Surprises me too. For decades, we had incremental improvements where more and more privacy and encryption was added to chat apps (e.g.: WhatsApp used to send messages in plain text, then added encryption to the server, then end to end encryption), and then Discord came along with none of that and all the gamers felt a need to use it. Eh?

I was a gamer until just before Discord appeared but what ever happened to things like Mumble and Signal

Discord's killer feature is the voice channels. The ability to join/leave the call easily is great. You don't have to ping people to get them into the call. You just hop in, and people can filter in/out as they please. It's very convenient.

That's precisely how Mumble works. People just don't know it anymore, open source application with no profit model, doomed to fail in favor of, or competition with, commercial services I suppose...

Do you both use iPhones? FaceTime Audio has helped me and my family with regard to crappy audio fidelity. I struggle with “normal” phone calls now, lol.

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