My least favourite thing about instant messaging is read receipts. They make me so anxious. Like, I know you saw my message, so answer my question!
Seriously, the only reason I have lock screen notifications turned on is so that I can sneak a peek at the text before committing myself to replying.
Please stop sending me a novel via text. If I need to scroll my screen to read the whole thing, then you have reached the point where a phone call is actually more appropriate. It would definitely be faster than typing all of that out.
And it's too long for the notification trick.
As someone with social anxiety, being able to just send someone a quick text is so much easier than working up the courage to make a phone call while mentally preparing a script that I'm just going to forget as soon as the person answers.
But it's far from perfect.
I'm actually not sure which is worse: being stuck on read or not having the option of knowing if the recipient has seen the message in the three days since you sent it.
It seemed to be this holy grail where not only would it speed up messaging with predictive text, but it would also correct typos on the fly.
Except that its learning algorithm quickly learns your most common misspellings and then you assume that what it's predicting you'll type is actually the correct spelling. It's not. Congratulations, you've found the fatal flaw of any algorithm: common sense.
