Specifically 27MHz CB radio.
People miles away can hear your conversations with your friends.
Sometimes in the daytime the radio signals bounce off the ionosphere, the noise level goes way up and local chatting range is reduced because stations from 600 miles to thousands of miles away are coming in.
In the days when it was popular trolling assholes would jam and disrupt. people up on a hill with an illegal high power amplifier talked over people.
In the 1970s and 1980s high power AM transmissions sometimes blasted out of the neighbors cheaply-made hifi or scrambled their TV picture.
https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/03/19/green-blackboa...
The eleven meter wavelength means you need a reasonably large antenna for good performance.
These days it is local CB is almost dead in most places and the noise level is often high in towns due to every house having a dozen switch mode power supplies and other electronics, which really reduces the range.
Decades ago, when it was popular, it was chaotic. Some CB radios did not receive well if someone nearby was talking within a few channels of you. Meet ups at pubs sometimes turned into fist fights.
These days, in most of Europe and the UK you may sometimes hear the last few old men and crazy nitwits that still use CB radio but they are often far away and a legal 4watt radio does not get out far enough for anyone to hear you.
Chat is not chat. Office Communicator and Skype for Business were chat apps. Teams is not. Not on desktop and doubly not on mobile.
Collaborative sites. SharePoint was a collaborative workspace. Teams' schizophrenic frankenstein of uninteroperable 'apps' from 'Lists' unaware of members of a Team to 3rd party *ware that has regressed in function, collaboration and interoperability from SharePoint so much a two decade old install of Joomla does a better job, is not.
Oh, and of course there are three different ways to add a code snippet now, and all three absolutely suck. In Slack there is one, and it just f’ing works.
Teams is free because no one would ever pay for it.
It was even called teams. So teams had a special use section called... teams. They recently changed the logic. Chats and teams are in the same place, but the rest is still a thing.
I don't think there is a way to notify a chat. Like on slack or zoom or whatever. You can make a webhook to teams (ekhm, the post board thing), but not a chat. So you basically can't use Teams to make many small notifications because you just can't show them next to each other - it's always a big post.
My favorite "feature" of teams is the missclicks. If you use it folded, when chat list (or teams list...) autohides, some parts of the list takes to the chat you want, but some...click the element that was beneath whatever you clicked.
So you wanted to change a chat to some 1:1 with a friend, but you clicked some OneNote in a group chat.
* Teams wanting to be a viewer for all kinds of filetypes. Why the hell would I want to view a Powerpoint presentation in Teams? What if I want to chat about the presentation, while viewing the presentation?
* Clipboard injection attacks. Who in the history of the humanity ever thought prefixing "[2:10 PM] Kimble, Richard:" into the URL/API key/thing-you-want-to-copy a colleague just sent you was a good idea? Yes I know you can manually highlight the text and copy, but you're forcing me to do intricate mouse movements that take time, dozens of times a day. I just want to triple-click, cmd+c, alt+tab, cmd+p
Overpromise, underdelivery.
Virtually every major function was broken at least once for me. Poor featerset, annoying and dumb ui. One of those app like skype before - you keep it only because of your grandma and few other important contacts who don’t know any better.
It is much worse than for instance pigeon mail. Because your expectations from pigeon mail more or less align with reality. And you expect from a 21st century software some basic things like cross device synchronization or at least reliable messsge and status drlivery, but it fails you, sonetimes in most important moments of your life.
The only feature they implemented well is video calls. It feels like it was implemented by some other (10x better) team than the rest of the app.
My world is divided into 2 spheres, personal and work. My personal world runs on WhatsApp. But then in my country everyone has WhatsApp. Nobody uses SMS (other than for spam and OTP), nobody cares about this week's offering from Google or Apple.
Voice calls, group chats, polls (invaluable for group decisions) DMs, etc.
I don't negate uour experience of it. Clearly it failed for you. But the nature of a thread like this is that it's all just personal experience, which is, not surprisingly all over the map.
1. They don’t know any better
2. Their expectations low (anything better than sms is already good enough)
3. They see “everyone is using it in my country” as the main feature
4. They are very light users (they don’t need cross device synchronization, they don’t do business or live inside a messenger for work, they don’t care about extra latency, clumsy ui, resiliency, backups etc).
Didn't even have to think about it.
You send
I send
You send
I highlight something and then comment below it in red
You reply in green
Can’t read it in order anymore
Edit: oh! Then because it was sent to 2+ other people they reply when they want, out of order, and add Bro from X who also has some pearls of wisdom.
NEVER use whatsapp for work communication. it blurs you personal and work life, there's no boundaries, you are online 24/7, it drains you energy, chats are completely ephemeral (if 30h have passed since a message its gone forever), no pins, no task tracking, no onboarding, no search, no automation, it starts to fall apart with half a dozen people, insecure if they steal your phone, dumb ui, no scheduling, no nothing. Work and personal life must be separated, one app for each. work done? CTRL+W slack and done, offline mode, in whatsapp you cannot close it and its very unprofessional. Your boss hits u up at saturday 9pm and you will have that chat unread lingering there and draining your energy till monday, constant context switch between work and personal. It's horrible.
If you are a startup founder, DO NOT use whatsapp for work comms.
I'm glad that I have this nice mechanical keyboard with a cord, and my recently added wired mouse to make things predictable here on my computer at home.
mattl•1d ago
silisili•1d ago