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Comment by semi-extrinsic | Hacker News Reader

Not the protocol, the group chat UX. iMessage gives kids easy access to a place where they can create groups, name them, invite and kick out other kids at will, and send messages + audio/video. It's minimally different from Snap or Discord - except that those actually have parental controls, and there is no easy way to disable iMessage group chats.

The equivalent is simply lacking from Android due to RCS group chat being a broken mess.

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> create groups, name them, invite and kick out other kids at will, and send messages + audio/video.

All of that has been (and still is) available on everyone's phones since the dawn of time except for "name them": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multimedia_Messaging_Service

  - create group: send an MMS message to whoever you want in the "group". Now you have a group chat.
  - invite people: send a new MMS message including all past participants and the one additional participant.
  - kick them out: Send a new MMS message including all past participants except for the person you want to remove.
  - send messages + audio/video: MMS supports all of this.

   > kick them out: Send a new MMS message including all past participants except for the person you want to remove.

That's forming a new group. When I'm kicking people out of my group it's because I no longer want them to participate.

It's the same thing. Just like how a "cash discount" is the same thing as a "credit card surcharge", the end result is the same regardless of how you word it. Simply stop using the first group. You can even be explicit by sending a message to the first group of "I'm forming a new group without Becky because she's a loser" or you can start the new group with a message "I started this new group without Becky because she's a loser" which has the added benefit of humiliating Becky as she keeps sending messages to a group that will not respond to her.

I don't know if you are purposefully being pedantic here, but they are very different things. Even as an adult who has been in several of these very active iMessage group chats with "mutual bullying", they are vastly different from any of the RCS/SMS groups I'm in due to some of the features in iMessage.

What are those features? I've never used iMessage but my ultimate point is that iMessage isn't enabling bullying, it just happens to be the platform these kids are currently using. The same bullying tactics have been possible since long before the iPhone existed.

So far semi-extrinsic provided a list of features they think is uniquely enabling bullying in iMessage but I've just established those features are actually commonly available to everyone, so what other features does iMessage have that uniquely makes it enable bullying compared to MMS?

I don't have an iPhone but surely you see how the UX is very different between:

(a) create new group minus Becky and minus all previous messages, plus every participant has to migrate over (b) "admin" kicks Becky and no one else has to do anything and all the history and context is retained

> plus every participant has to migrate over

I've been in plenty of MMS group chats where we've had to create a new group to add or remove someone (for non-bullying reasons) and it has always gone smoothly without issue. SMS/MMS apps tend to sort your list of groups by most recently received message, so as soon as people stop using the first group it will naturally decay to the bottom of your list where no one looks.

> "admin" kicks Becky and no one else has to do anything

"admin" creates a new group chat, no one else has to consciously do anything because they're just selecting the group that has the most recent messages and therefore is at the top of their SMS/MMS app.

There is one difference here in that with SMS/MMS there is no "admin" so anyone can create new groups, but if you're going to start evicting people without buy-in from the group then the dissenters are just going to form their own groups anyway regardless of platform.

> all the history and context is retained

That is a fair point, you wouldn't maintain the history/context but how important is that for bullying? My ultimate point here is that fastball is correct in that the iMessage platform isn't enabling bullying, it is just the kids preferred platform. We have all been perfectly capable of the same bullying since long before the iPhone existed, and I don't think losing history/context when forming new groups changes that.

Have you ever actually been in an MMS group chat?

MMS is the worst standard in telco and that's saying something. The spec is impossibly complex, so it's not properly supported by carriers or device manufacturers, and even basic cases like "send this photo" fail alarmingly regularly.

Yeah, I really tried to cover a part of how it's so bad in my post. It's really something from a different time. There's a lot of the old WAP 1.0 kind of thinking where the carrier ran their own proxy to make the content consumable by the end device due to limitations at the time. If you don't fetch the content off the MMSC in time it expires. I know there's lots of RCS spam complaints, but the carriers ran email to MMS gateways that had abuse for years.

Verizon had the wackiest system with their vtext service where it really tried to customize more than the GSM carriers and they ran their own web portal. When they phased that out a few years ago it broke picture scaling for pretty much all non-iphone devices on their network. This is another big reason I wanted working RCS because if I send a picture to Android users on Verizon it ends up scaled down.

I have owned a mobile phone since 1996-ish IIRC (Nokia 1610).

I have sent exactly zero MMS messages successfully. They've always failed on some stupid carrier setting being wrong. I've also "received" MMS image messages - that were links to a carrier portal because the image could not be delivered.

It's a shit standard that nobody bothered to implement properly =)

I'm surprised you seem to presume that WhatsApp, Discord etc. wouldn't immediately fill the gap.

At least in Berlin (School and Uni) my experience was that WhatsApp was far more prevalent already (due to more mixed Android/iOS environment likely).

If all the "mean girls" are on iMessage, then being on Android is insulating.

yes. Android is "broke broke", so the cool kids won't use it

Src: my 12 yo daughter

how is that different than regular kids groups at school and/or in the playgrounds?

It’s more insidious, and “always on”. The bullied have no respite from the bullies. As someone who was horribly bullied at school I can only imagine the horror kids face now. It’s not the technology per se, it’s the fact that society seems to think it’s not only ok but often expected for kids to have smartphones and all the digital footprint that goes along with them.

I was brought up in a household where we had very limited access to TV. As a teenager I thought this was terrible. As an adult I realise what a huge benefit it was to me. I am sure that the same goes for kids and smartphones and group chats. They are not necessary. No one is missing out.

> The bullied have no respite from the bullies

I feel like I am missing something important here.

The great-grandparent comment was talking about things like not being invited/kicked out of group chats, not being spammed/harassed through the messaging protocol in question.

Unless I am genuinely missing something important, I agree with the grandparent comment. How does not being invited to certain group chats is different from not being invited to "cool kids groups" at school/playgrounds? As in, how is it "always on"? Not being invited to a chat or being kicked out of a group chat isn't "always on".

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