• zelluut@lemmynsfw.com
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    4 days ago

    It’d come down to popularity and ease of use, right? I don’t know if it’s “good” generally to verb a company, but if it’s popular and either easy to say or easy to shorten, it’ll be easy to turn into a verb. Surprisingly, I hear “snapchatted me” not uncommonly, despite not using Snapchat myself.

    Twittered me doesn’t work, because dms aren’t the primary use. If someone said “oh i’ll twitter you” I’d assume it’d be a post pinging me or something and think it’s kind of a strange way to say that. If dms were the primary use case of Twitter on release, I think “tweet” probably would have gone there, and if tweet wasn’t decided on early posting on twitter would just become “twittered” or probably more like twiting, has to be short and catchy after all.

    iMessage and Facebook Messenger I believe are both default apps (less sure about fb Messenger, might be my memory playing tricks on me). The default message app is “texting”, which I think is why the others get verbed. Also doesn’t help that Messenger isn’t that distinct from “message” which is what text means anyways, and Facebook falls into the Twitter problem. Not a lot of good ways to abbreviate for speech either.

    I imagine Signal just isn’t popular enough, I don’t know if I went to a group of people they would know what I meant. Definitely can’t help that “signalling” is a real word with a different meaning that humans regularly do, so if you use it with someone who doesn’t know they’ll just be confused. If you were with a group that had the main chat in signal, I think saying “oh yeah I’ll signal you” wouldn’t be like an outrageous thing to say. Might be different since for Signal users it tends to be a full or almost full replacement, so saying “text” implies “signal”.