Teenage Chat Trends Are Kinda Weird
Hello, this is TheTechBoy with a special article. Hey, look a green bubble. Photo by Volodymyr Hryshchenko on Unsplash At my school, I have noticed that teenagers use Snapchat to communicate with each other; some use Instagram, and even some use TikTok (which is insanely weird when you think about it). This begs the question: why? Why are social media applications being used to chat with friends when SMS is free? Why are they not using dedicated WiFi-based chat applications such as WhatsApp, Telegram, or Signal? It is not because a phone call is intimate; Instagram and Snapchat allow you to call people. It is not for security reasons, as Snapchat is not end-to-end encrypted (and messages can be viewed on any device, unlike SMS), and I doubt the teens are worried about SS7-based tracking... One actual messaging application has broken through to teens, but it costs 1000 dollars to enter and can be hard to leave. Of course...