I wonder how much companies lose just because people hate being forced into things, and they develop a strong aversion to something they'd actually use otherwise just because its pushed onto them.

What's worse, this even affects the few who try to introduce new things respectfully, because people are so in the "IF SOMEONE OFFERS ME SOMETHING IT'S JUST CRAP I DON'T WANT" mindset that they reject new things outright.

just that they have way more important features and fixes to work on. shows wrong prioritisation in my opinion.

Assuming everyone you know isn't already using Signal, I think the most important "feature" for any existing Signal user is getting more users on there.

As far as I can tell, lots of people love stories.

A lot of people love SMS too.

No one on this site should love SMS. It's just a huge security vulnerability and while it sucks having to reactivate the built-in SMS app I totally get their reasoning behind it. Having SMS integrated into Signal was damaging their reputation for something they could never have any control over, so why support it? Any business trying to stay alive would repeat their decision on this.

> so why support it?

Because it helps me convince new users to try it out.

I used to be able to tell people, "You can change your messaging app to Signal and it'll send secure messages to other people on Signal and you'll still be able to send text messages to everyone else." Seamless.

Now I have to convince them to use two different apps for messaging.

SMS sucks but it has a massive user base.

Their reasoning for removing SMS was that it was insecure and people didn't know when they were sending an insecure SMS or a secure Signal message. Loads of people suggested they just put SMS in it's own tab to differentiate them and that was dismissed like it was a dumb idea. Then they add "Stories" (a feature nobody is going to use because they don't have a user base for it) and put it in a separate tab.

I honestly don't understand why they think Stories, a feature that caters to social media users, is going to to be used by the new target audience (with the removal of SMS) of security conscious techies.

but why? it's like an ephemeral facebook post or something?

On iOS, there’s also a setting which lets you disable it entirely and hides that extra tab. I did it.

Yes, it's in the article and also works on android.

Yeah that was my first reaction as well and I am still not sure how I feel about Signal pursuing this, but I appreciated the opt out option. I also appreciated that they talked about opting out early in the blog post before diving deeper into the mechanics.

A little while back I felt this way about 'stickers'. It seemed like a completely unnecessary feature I've never used and designed to achieve parity.

Last week I spoke to my 20-something sister and learned that it's basically a must-have for her friend group, who sometimes have entire conversations just with stickers shared in her group.

Had no idea, but in hindsight realized I'm no longer tuned in enough to know how people just 10 years younger communicate, let alone from different cultures.

My point is: 100% agree. Glad it's not in my face and not caring is the way to go. Being cynical about these features is probably ignorance

I'm currently 20 and mostly use stickers for “repetitive” messages, like “Good Morning” and the like. Sometimes to convey emotions that are hard to type out at that moment, too.

Creating custom sticker packs is also fun, including memes or cute cats.

But of course I don't speak for everyone my age, and it's different for each culture and personality.

Thank you for the insight. It's always interesting to hear how the experience of tech is different among people of other generations/demographics. Honestly, I wouldn't have pegged your generation as the one to use stickers - somehow it seems more in line with how boomers communicate.

About once a week I accidentally send a sticker in Signal. It feels like it should be impossible, but somehow my subconscious muscle memory uses those positions for something. But I've never met anyone else with this problem and still haven't figured out how or why I'm doing it, so I can't blame them.

my older relatives do this with swipe-to-reply, every other message is a reply to some random previous message ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

This just underlines how unintuitive swipe gestures are. There is no way to tell the feature exists or what swiping might do, and having horizontal finger drag do interactions when vertical drag just browses is simply inaccessible to many people.

I still do not understand why everyone and their cat copied that from Tinder.

On my phone, that new tab necessitates a tab bar that takes up more than 10% of the screen estate. I immediately disabled stories for that reason alone.