Comment by matheusmoreira
4 years ago
Yeah. SMS is not free here either. Probably. I don't even know, nobody uses it anymore. I do remember friends describing "plans" that included some number of free messages or whatever. I also remember the mobile service providers absolutely seething about WhatsApp. They lobbied the government for protectionism against the app that was disrupting their shitty services. Hilarious and sad at the same time. Wish these legacy corporations would just get wiped off the face of this earth so that humanity can make some actual progress instead of keeping these parasites on life support.
> But SMS is gone and a lot of people disabled notifications for it as it’s only used for ads by the provider (and it was a big issue with the government tried to run health campaigns there).
My mobile carrier also thinks it's acceptable to send me ads via SMS. The very first time they did this, I disabled all SMS notifications forever. The government also tried to send me COVID-19 related messages but I only saw them years later when I randomly decided to clean up my SMS inbox.
They have only themselves to blame, really. If they wanted a clean communications channel, they should not have allowed companies to pollute it with an infinite amount of worthless noise. Nobody wants to be subjected to advertising.