
Messaging App Jott Is Blowing Up Among Junior High and High Schoolers - Errorcod3
http://techcrunch.com/2015/06/08/messaging-app-jott-is-blowing-up-among-junior-high-and-high-schoolers/
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dmix
Another app that claims to be privacy-friendly and used by teenagers, from
their website:

> OWN YOUR PRIVACY

> Stop wondering what happens to your photos and texts after you hit send.
> Jott’s privacy features, such as screenshot detection and disappearing
> chats, keep you in control of your privacy.

I hear a lot of people say that kids growing up today will be immune to
surveillance since they grew up with it, and will likely not care it's
happening.

But the privacy of their chats and photos seems pretty important to them, so I
question the validity of this stance. Maybe thanks to Snapchat for making this
type of feature easy and accessible.

~~~
jerf
It has struck me repeatedly over the past couple of years that there's a lot
of places in our society where we have

    
    
        1. Flushed all our old social ideas down the toilet
        2. Had raucous, loud celebrations of our new freedoms
        3. Discovered the problems that prompted the old social ideas
        4. Started the long, slow process of groping for new social
           ideals
    

and in many cases, it seems to me that we're headed for

    
    
        5. Re-discovering the old social ideals actually had reasons
           and that rather than discarding them and replacing
           them wholesale we'd have been a lot better off
           tweaking them.
    

There's a lot of places where we're doing this. Some of them still have too
many people in #2 to make it politic to name all of them, but when you look at
our society through this lens a _lot_ of stuff suddenly makes more sense.
We'll see how this theory's predictive power pans out.

(And to be clear, in step 5, a lot of our ideals _do_ need tweaking; that's
not a rhetorical concession, but a core part of the process. But I'd submit
we've thrown out far more baby with the bathwater than almost anybody in
modern times is any longer equipped to understand.)

~~~
walterbell
Good algo draft. Any semi-capable _provacateur_ will propose forks of
culture/language/code/regulation with putative popular benefits but silent
advantages to some groups. This especially applies to the retention of
previous silent advantages. With slow forks and manipulation of "corrective"
pendulum swings, each swing of the scythe can redistrict the landscape in non-
obvious ways.

The short stories of R.A. Lafferty contain many instances of such patterns,
often as historical or science fiction.

~~~
brg
This is the second time R.A. Lafferty has come up in comments today.
Amazon.com shows 69 different texts, do you have any recommendation on where
to begin?

[http://www.amazon.com/R.-A.-Lafferty/e/B001HCU6PE](http://www.amazon.com/R.-A.-Lafferty/e/B001HCU6PE)

~~~
walterbell
Some of his stories are on the web,
[http://www.ralafferty.org/works/collections/online-
stories/](http://www.ralafferty.org/works/collections/online-stories/)

An overview of his style,
[http://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2014/aug/13/ra-
la...](http://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2014/aug/13/ra-lafferty-
secret-sci-fi-genius-poised-for-comeback)

His most popular collection was _Nine Hundred Grandmothers_ ,
[http://www.ralafferty.org/works/collections/nine-hundred-
gra...](http://www.ralafferty.org/works/collections/nine-hundred-
grandmothers/)

Most of his work is out of print or rare, but a search for "Man Who Talled
Tales" may help.

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aantix
Adding 10-20K of young users that don't have the income to even have a data
plan?

So they're acquiring 10-20K broke users a day? So acquisition is the only way
this company stays alive..

~~~
chatmasta
They're broke right now. They won't be broke in a few years.

Sidenote: how do teens spend money online nowadays? When I was < 18 I used a
paypal account + credit card in my parent's name. Have technologies like
Bitcoin changed payment patterns amongst the teen demographic?

~~~
aantix
So you're banking on a demographic that is broke right now, probably pretty
broke in the near future (college), with the anticipation that they'll
eventually spend money with your service 5-10 years down the line?

That business model is broke, just like the students.

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untog
I'm dubious of how many US high schoolers don't have data - many will be on a
family plan. Not to say none of them are data-less, but I don't think this
will become the next Snapchat based on one feature.

~~~
frederickf
I've never been on a family plan. On a family plan is it possible for parents
to see information about the texts their kids send (or even the texts
themselves)? If so, that might be a reason for kids to use this service.

~~~
mng2
Back maybe ten years ago, I was on an AT&T family plan, and the bill had every
single text printed out on it. But texts were 10 cents apiece so I didn't
really use them.

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gabemart
> More than adults. Girls send, on average, about 3,952 text messages a month,
> and boys send closer to 2,815 text messages a month

The average boy sends 2,815 text messages per month? 94 per day? 6 per waking
hour, every hour, every day, every week for a month? On _average_?

The _average_ girl sends 8 text messages per waking hour, every hour?

Wow.

~~~
rverghes
Consider that each line in a conversation is a separate text. So if you have a
5 min conversation with a friend, each of you spends 15s on a reply, then you
have 10 texts in that conversation. And that was just a short conversation.

If you phrase it as "the average teen says 94 sentences to his friends each
day", that doesn't sound so extreme. And a good portion of those sentence will
come in a few much longer conversations.

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lazyant
You don't need a phone number with Kik either, texting with bluetooth seems
like the modern version of passing little paper notes in class, any "serious"
use beyond the classrooms?

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kolev
I think those targeting teens should learn that teens change their minds like
they change their styles - founders, sell before you get of fashion!

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wahsd
So is this some sort of mesh network?

~~~
cleverjake
it literally says that it is in the article.

