A simple solution to the scourge of read receipts

Everyone knows why read receipts are this decade’s most annoying tech trend. As Allison Davis wrote at The Cut last year:

The Read Receipt has become the gestapo of smartphone communication: It acts as an etiquette enforcer, making sure we’re all available all of the time. With Read Receipts, the only socially acceptable response time is “Now.”

They’re inescapable on Facebook Messenger, Snapchat, and WhatsApp, and Apple is always pushing us to enable them in iMessage. For years, people have been saying this is a bad thing.

But here’s a different way of looking at it: What if everyone turned on read receipts and — this is the important part — clicked on every message immediately? We don’t actually have to reply in that moment; we just want the “read” indicator to show up.

It might be weird at first, but it would quickly undermine the power of read receipts by stripping them of their current connotations. We would get used to seeing that a message was “read” and not expecting a split-second reply. Sure, it’s a small thing, but it draws a line in the sand. It pushes back, if ever so slightly, against Silicon Valley’s selfish insistence that we must always be connected. Tech companies, after all, are really only interested in facilitating conversations as long as you’re using their apps. The read receipt is a nudge not just to keep talking, but — perhaps more importantly — to keep spending your screen time on their software.

Further, this practice would help to restore the original meaning of the word “read.” Just as an “alphabet” was once a set of letters, and a “moment” was once a measure of time, “reading” once simply meant converting words to meanings. The insidious implication that “reading” something is commensurate with “being ready to respond” is only a recent construction. The good news is that we can fix this. Just turn on read receipts wherever you can — show that reading something doesn’t have to mean anything more. 📖