I honestly think this is a bit of a generational gap. I grew up in the 90s and remember when “PCS” phones (the kind that started the whole personal cellphone thing for the masses) did not have text messaging. Then, later, some did, others didn’t.
Eventually, every phone and carrier supported SMS. IMO, that’s partly because they charged per message. Shortly after that, some carriers offered a friends and family texting plan, where you could set a small amount of phone numbers (I think 5 was common) that would be unlimited texting, everyone else you texted was some small amount per message.
Pretty quickly that was followed with unlimited texting plans.
Almost immediately after that long form texting, aka MMS was introduced, but it was problematic from day one… You could also send multimedia over MMS, like pictures… They were compressed to hell, but it worked… Sometimes.
Everything went RCS and data driven chats after that.
The key point I’m driving at is that early texting, aka SMS, was limited to a maximum of 160 characters, which might just be able to contain the jist of a sentence. If you grew up before sms became a thing, long form may suit you better than alternatives. If you grew up with SMS, you probably have a learned behavior that text based messages should be pretty short and to the point, so many small-ish messages are probably required.
I am excited to see what happens with those that didn’t have to limit their messages to 160 characters, grow up.
I’m more or less on the cusp of the technology. I was subscribed pretty early on in my youth, so I’m kind of both but also nether. Anyways…
In my experience the biggest reason texts were short wasn’t the limit but the fact that we grew up having to text on a telephone keypad so it took forever.
Forgive me, friend, but I am not familiar. You’re saying they send like… like… voice-mail? Fucking monsters.
The text doesn’t do my sentiment credit. I, too, would hate those people. My boss does this. Hostages people in conversations. I don’t want to be your fucking soundboard for 47 minutes mate!
I text multiple paragraph texts back to back over and over again. I’m told even being that verbose I’m still completely incomprehensible most of the time.
It’s partially that, but I more use obscure definitions for words rather than their intuitive ones. The issue is I don’t know what the average person will understand.
The bigger problem is probably that I’m super autistic and expect people to know what I’m thinking just because I know it. I write a thousand paragraphs clarifying useless details to try to be clear, and then somebody will be like “Okay, but you never even once mentioned what it is you’re talking about,” and I’ll be like “Oh, I assumed by the fact that I said I was excited and mentioned several things that don’t happen in real life that it was clear I was talking about a new game I was enjoying.”
I never know what details are actually useful to clarify until somebody’s getting confused about one of them (or usually more like 50 of them.)
Yeah I can relate a little bit. I was never that bad but I was kind of like that as a teenager and I am ever so slightly autistic, I think.
Think of caveman. Why use many word when few do trick? Even if it doesn’t feel like your natural flow of consciousness, try to channel him, and simplify.
What gets me is that most apps I’ve seen do not use the full screen width to display messages. On a phone, in portrait mode, the screen is small enough, but the apps only use about 75% of the screen width. when they could use more. THis makes walls of text/paragraphs even more difficult to read.
Honestly it depends on the context. If my good buddy is sending me their thoughts on a really bad piece of media then ya I want the stream of consciousness take. But if this is a random text from an acquaintance then it better be in as few chunks as possible
My brother hates when I do it, he straight up mutes me on discord for a day or so if I do it hahaha Probably other people too… As someone said here, it’s probably my ADHD, never thought about it in that way but it does make sense.
I’ve been trying to cut down on the amount I send though. Keeping things concise, as much as I can.
Some people also don’t like getting a wall of text, smaller text messages (think paragraph size) can be easier to scroll, digest and respond too.
Sometimes it’s the same thought, sometimes it’s multiple. I’ve never had someone ask me to put multiple messages in one to make it easier to deal with. Usually want them broken down.
I’ve never sent a text more than a couple paragraphs but I would say that paragraph long messages are not considered short, it’s talking about the annoyance of when people send 12 different 5-word texts successively
I think whoever is doing that is fucking with you.
We can finish whole sentences, lots of them, we just get this anxiety that you won’t understand because our brains are broken, so we keep adding more to try and get our point across and then we realize we have sent too much, so then we have to explain that.
It’s just a bunch of snowballing into a negative feedback loop after that, that’s when we stop all the texting and just try to figure out what the hell is wrong with us and how to fix it.
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