Table of Contents
Today, recipient feedback is a blunt instrument. You can either entirely block a number on your device, or submit the offending message to 7726 and hope your carrier gets to it before the next message reaches your inbox. For senders who follow the rules, you can respond to the message with STOP, UNSUBSCRIBE, END, etc. to opt out of all messaging from that sender. However, this would not be ideal for the dentist who sent you a 30% off coupon for teeth whitening, as you would also be opted out of their appointment notifications.
What if we gave the recipient finer-grained controls? What if we offered a “report junk” feature that could be tracked across the network? What if these user-generated signals fed into the reputation of the sender?
SMS, the new Email
None of these asks are computationally complex. Instead, the problem lies in the lack of upgrades to the end-user experience since the inception of SMS. What made it an enduring medium is now the shackle holding it back. As the world continues to push more content through SMS, the medium has been pushed beyond what Friedhelm Hillebrand could have imagined in 1984.
Email, on the other hand, is barely recognizable from its early beginnings. When I started college, Unix-based Pine was the only sanctioned way to get our university email. I remember getting my first non-.edu account from Hotmail and feeling like I was operating a spaceship.
Today, email clients and services are barely recognizable from their predecessors. They have become the central distribution centers of our lives. To facilitate this role, all major email providers now have the concept of a primary inbox, with multiple ancillary inboxes for nonessential messages. Yet SMS still has only one inbox for all messages, whether they’re texts from family, travel updates from airlines, or marketing correspondence.
Now, such comparisons to email might be heresy to some, as the medium has become so riddled with spam. But like SMS, email is a medium that refuses to die. Every so often, someone will proclaim it dead, yet email volumes continue to increase. In fact, SMS is email’s only serious competitor, as new applications and use cases will inevitably make SMS more like email.
With this in mind, it is necessary for SMS to upgrade its user experience. From a spam mitigation perspective, the inbox upgrade will give more controls back to the recipient. If the message is phishing, unwanted, or spam, the classification provided by the user would feed back into the network. Doing so will also reduce the wireless network from making content decisions without the user’s knowledge. An email-like inbox would put moderation controls back in the hands of the recipient, making content moderation a shared responsibility.
Next
There have been attempts to improve the SMS experience in its entirety (like RCS and Joyn before that) and in small, directed ways like Google’s Verified SMS. We’ll discuss why these initiatives failed in the context of regulation. But before that, we’ll discuss the broken feedback loops and how the inbox upgrade would fix it.