This sort of thing is something I really like reading about. How do the ways humans communicate shift over time?

When I send a Snap to any of the people in my address book, the oldies respond, inevitably, with some text message, maybe an emoji if they're somewhat hip. If I send a Snap to a young'un, inevitably I'll receive a selfie in response.

After early emoticons came the age of emoji, and now the GIF has shouldered its way into the conversation. Each successive communications trend brings a more efficient carrier of emotion, per byte, than text, and compression matters in this clipped conversational age.

In most cases, I much prefer receiving a selfie in reply to a message I send than a text response, because the human face is a miraculous instrument, almost incapable of the abstraction of raw text. Still, I can't bring myself to send selfies as responses.

This was written in 2017. I wonder how much it has changed now? I suspect Eugene Wei overestimated how much people are willing to send selfies. However it is also possible that I don't participate in any kind of communication medium that lends itself to this form.