Comment by ygjb
2 years ago
That is a shockingly user hostile take, especially considering you call out the reason why so many people still use it: it is the only solution for most users that consistently works.
The main reason people still use it is despite the issues with MMS (and SMS in general) the reality is that every vendor wants to own the messaging stack to build or strengthen moat, and the regulators who are in a position to enforce standard protocols have incentives in many or all countries to weaken the security of messaging protocols to meet surveillance objectives (whether those objectives are well scrutinized methods with judicial oversight, or blanket surveillance requirements).
Blaming the user as lazy or incompetent completely overlooks the significant financial incentives that platform owners and network providers have to maintain the status quo, or force the new status quo to strengthen their moats.
Both your post and OP's are confident and emotionally forceful without any reasoning why. On one hand, in most of the world, especially countries less developed than the US, messaging apps are very popular and SMS is either not even provided in the plan or barely used. On the other I do think that at the very least phone manufacturers consider MMS/SMS to be a core functionality because it's built into most phones. As such it does feel user hostile to not care about MMS/SMS. I can see the merits of both but don't know why I'd believe one over the other.
I'm curious where y'all's confidence comes from in user hostility or not and what indicators you have to tip your hand one way or the other. That might result in more elucidating conversation too.
Sure, I consider calling users lazy and incompetent very hostile because I have spent nearly 22 years building, testing and securing systems starting with ecommerce apps in the early 2000s, through government, finance, browsers and supporting services (Mozilla), internet scale infrastructure at OpenDNS, Cisco, And Fastly, and now at Amazon.
All along the way people routinely attack users for making poor decisions when they are simply using defaults, or the easiest to use and most compatible technologies.
* Pffft... Of course they got hacked, they used IE * Of course they got hacked, they opened an email attachment * Of course they got hacked, they clicked that homoglyph
In this particular case, SMS and MMS are baked into the phone, and delivered by the wireless provider, and for better or worse on the UX front, work with just a phone number and across all mobile OS. For anything other than that, if users have peers using other device or services, the alternative is to use multiple services to communicate with different groups based on which services they use. That means repeating messages across multiple providers, and/or missing folks because all the platform services have actively silo'd their platforms to prevent interoperability.
Yeah, SMS and MMS suck, but they suck less for the simple use case of messaging folks with cell phones, because the barrier to messaging those folks is having their phone number.
It's lazy and incompetent to attack users when users actually have very little control over the actual security or usability of the services and systems they use, especially as everything is hosted in cloud platforms.
Most people couldnt care less with sub par video message security for most (not all) uses. The fact that every vendor want anything but a good standard stack for keeping their users captive is imo a more powerful incentive.