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.
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.
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