This does not match my experience at all. There's no limit to the amount of text I can send and it's not ephemeral. Thus there's really nothing preventing me f

This does not match my experience at all. There's no limit to the amount of text I can send and it's not ephemeral. Thus there's really nothing preventing me from typing out thoughtful messages, which I do. As for attention, anything can suck away attention if you let it. I don't find WhatsApp (or other similar chat apps) to be any worse than e-mail or snail mail. I look at them when I want to and no more. Again, there's no real rush, because the messages aren't ephemeral. [1] There are social media sites that truly lead towards shallow conversations, like reddit where a quick joke gets more upvotes, or twitter where you have a tiny character limit and your message gets immediately drowned by everyone else's latest angry tweet. What's more, I've seen plenty of shallow conversations face to face. Thus I think it depends very much on the specific human to human match whether they will have any meaningful deep conversations. If the humans are capable of it, they can do it on WhatsApp as easily as face to face. [2] -- [1] Unless of course you specifically configure them to be ephemeral, e.g. in Signal. [2] Yes I realize that face to face has the benefit of body language, but WhatsApp has the benefit of remoteness and asynchronicity. Thus I'll call it a wash.