That’s definitely part of it, but I think a bigger contributor is iMessage. iPhones have a dominant market share in the US and iMessage has been the gold standard for a long time and it doesn’t even use the SMS system.
It is elsewhere now it’s just in the past it used to be stupidly expensive to send SMS.
It’s wjere text speak came from, I believe they used to actually charge by the character so if you wanted to tell somebody you’ll “be at the train station in 15 minutes” that’s quite a lot of characters, so that became “@ stn n 15” which is almost incomprehensible these days.
When WhatsApp became available everybody went over because suddenly you could communicate like humans, after the phone company’s realized that the jig was up they lowered text prices but by that point everyone had gotten used to just using WhatsApp.
Text speak mostly came from typing on dumb phone number pads to enter text. Like if you wanted to type “hi” you would have to enter “4-4 pause 4-4-4” As you might expect 5 putting presses with a pause between some of them just to say “hi” got painful. Thus the shortening.
Text messages were always charged per message. But each message was limited to 160 ascii characters or less if you were using other encodings. You could send 1 character or 160 characters but it cost 20 cents (at least where I grew up) either way.
This is all separate from l33t speak which is a whole different thing.
IIRC it’s because US cell carriers don’t charge as much as others for sending and receiving SMS
That’s definitely part of it, but I think a bigger contributor is iMessage. iPhones have a dominant market share in the US and iMessage has been the gold standard for a long time and it doesn’t even use the SMS system.
That makes sense, SMS is essentially free here.
It is elsewhere now it’s just in the past it used to be stupidly expensive to send SMS.
It’s wjere text speak came from, I believe they used to actually charge by the character so if you wanted to tell somebody you’ll “be at the train station in 15 minutes” that’s quite a lot of characters, so that became “@ stn n 15” which is almost incomprehensible these days.
When WhatsApp became available everybody went over because suddenly you could communicate like humans, after the phone company’s realized that the jig was up they lowered text prices but by that point everyone had gotten used to just using WhatsApp.
I remember my parents flipping shit over a $0.50 fee for a handfull of messages before text was unlimited.
Text speak mostly came from typing on dumb phone number pads to enter text. Like if you wanted to type “hi” you would have to enter “4-4 pause 4-4-4” As you might expect 5 putting presses with a pause between some of them just to say “hi” got painful. Thus the shortening.
Text messages were always charged per message. But each message was limited to 160 ascii characters or less if you were using other encodings. You could send 1 character or 160 characters but it cost 20 cents (at least where I grew up) either way.
This is all separate from l33t speak which is a whole different thing.
That is if you stay within one country. I still get some insane charges if I text someone 60 kilometers away because it’s international.
It still expensive to use your phone abroad that hasn’t improved