Why do you turn on read receipts?

Why'd You Push That Button?

Vox Media Podcast Network

Society & Culture, Arts, Technology, Design

4.4 • 683 Ratings

🗓️ 24 October 2017

⏱️ 22 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Here it is! The second episode of a new Verge podcast called Why’d You Push That Button. On this show, my colleague, Circuit Breaker’s Ashley Carman, and me, the Culture section’s most self-indulgent blogger, talk about all the tiny decisions your gadgets and apps force you to make every day. All day, every day, we’re pushing buttons and thinking about the intended or unintended consequences. We’re interviewing consumers — including friends, co-workers, loved ones, and some strangers — and then we’re talking to product designers and experts who built the tech or have studied it professionally. Last week, we started things off with Tinder’s Super Like feature. This week, we’re talking about read receipts — the timestamp that’s optional in iMessage and mandatory in Facebook Messenger, that lets anyone who’s trying to correspond with you know exactly when you saw their words and chose not to respond. Why do you leave them on? Why do you turn them off? Why must you insist on subtly manipulating every person in your life? We heard from our friends who have made these choices, and then we took their responses to Lujayn Alhddad, who studied human-computer interaction while obtaining her master's degree at the Rochester Institute of Technology. She wrote a paper on this exact topic, and she knows what’s up. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Do you use red receipts?
0:02.0	I do not use red receipts.
0:04.0	I use read receipts because if people don't see that I read the message, then I might not reply.
0:10.0	It keeps me honest.
0:11.0	If I don't want to respond to somebody, I don't want it to be very obvious that I don't want to respond to them.
0:16.0	It's not that I'm a bad texter. I choose to ignore certain people and I would rather they not know. So I'll like read as much as I can on the notification and then leave it there forever
0:24.3	until I actually feel like I want to bother responding to them.
0:27.8	Hello, welcome to Why'd You Push That Button, a show where Caitlin Tiffany and Ashley
0:34.3	Carmen, that's me, talk about the choices technology forces us to make.
0:39.4	This week, we are talking about red receipts.
0:42.3	Read receipts.
0:42.9	Oh, gosh.
0:43.6	Please say read receipts and not read receipts because it's embarrassing for you.
0:46.9	I don't actually know which one's going to come out of my mouth at any moment.
0:49.9	Here's the concept of a read receipt.
0:51.7	It just means you send a message and the app you're using
0:55.7	tells you that the person who received it read it. So I send a text to Ashley. Hey, Ashley, what's up?
1:01.7	You want to get dinner tonight? It says read 12.34 p.m. And she never responds. That's a devastating
1:08.2	scenario. Yeah. So we've noticed that this can definitely cause some
1:12.5	drama in some friend groups because obviously if you send a message and the person doesn't respond,
1:18.3	but you know they saw it, maybe you'll start questioning what you said or you start questioning
1:23.2	yourself. Like, did you do something wrong? It's kind of like getting the silent treatment from a
	...

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