Communicating is hard. Having to think about how you’re going to reply to someone’s text message is stressful. Who has the time to actually hold a real conversation or come up with a response to, “Hey, how are you?”
Thankfully, you don’t have to go it alone. Textie is here for you.
This marketplace of convenient answers to friends and lovers’ questions and statements exists solely to help you overcome SMS writer’s block. You no longer need to reply with “k”—unless the Internet tells you to do so, in which case you should definitely respond with “k.”
To enlist strangers’ help with your replies, simply upload the original text message to Textie. The site will then crowdsource replies, with the most popular suggestion getting upvoted to the top of the list. If you’re super desperate—if you’re not only unable to come up with responses but also legitimately willing to pay for suggestions—you can spend $0.99 to bump your question to the top of the queue.
People have already given up gracious brain power to help reply to texts like “Hey I am at work” and “Hahahh Sunday fun day? [embarassed emoji] [chicken leg emoji].”
Textie
Textie is the product of a weekend hackathon in Perth, Australia. Considering that it was built in 48 hours, it has some pretty robust features. As creator Cam Sinclair describes it, “The original idea was to help people who find it hard to respond to deep and meaningful messages, sheer stupidity or witty quips.”
There are some more serious requests, to be sure, but relying on the kindness of Internet commenters is a quick way to ensure that your conversation goes downhill fast.
“But,” you might say, “I ask my friends for advice all the time when replying to texts messages.”
Of course you do. Everyone does. We ask our friends—people who know us, our quirks, our personalities, and our general interests—to help us respond to text messages and queries from other friends and crushes. But you certainly don’t do it all the time, and—if you’re like me—only a tiny handful of people know you well enough to even make a good suggestion.
Uploading your private text messages to a public service in an effort to be funny, quick, or a bit more honest only further erodes the authenticity of communication. We’re already separated by devices shooting pixels at our eyeballs all day, giving us the opportunity to think about responses before we send them. Textie adds yet another layer of fakery to our already strained communications.
But hey, if you’d rather have the Internet decide what you should say, by all means, use Textie. It might be a fun way to kill time by messing with strangers. Just remember that most of the people with whom you’re chatting would rather have your authentic self than a line fed to you by some anonymous Internet user.
Photo via Micadew/Flickr (CC BY-SA 2.0)
