3 ms·

Ask HN: Why did group chat never really take off?

• _delirium 16y ago
  It feels like it actually was common in the 90s, though maybe that's just people I knew. But both techie and non-techie groups I knew in high school had chatrooms that groups of friends would frequently visit and 'hang out' in--- AOL or IRC chatrooms, depending on the circle of friends. It does seem like that sort of thing has gotten less common, though; not sure why. I do still use IRC for that purpose (not just for large groups filled with people I don't know irl), but admittedly it's mostly with more-technical groups of friends these days. It doesn't seem that commonly using AOL-style chatrooms to chat with rl friends is as common among 'normal' people as it was in the AOL days.
• krakensden 16y ago
  It's awkwardly or not supported by the IM clients people use, that's why. On another note, group chat is kind a crappy experience. It only takes 3 people talking for it to become impossible to follow, and the IRC idlers culture is foreign and strange to people.
• hasenj 16y ago
  I think it's just because the technology for it sucks, and I think it's a great idea for a startup -- you know, the idea of making it easy to just hang out with a group of friends online. I think the difficulty of setting it up is multiplied by the size of the group: if it's difficult for 3 people to coordinate on installation and configuration of the technology (software) then imagine how difficult it is for a group of 7 people. Maybe the difficulty grows exponentially ..?
• pseudonym 16y ago
  I think we've gotten better at compartmentalizing our conversations. When IRC and AOL chatrooms were big, the idea of online communication was fairly new. Nowadays, most people can handle the concept of asynchronous chatting with ease-- being able to follow multiple, non-real time (in the sense that you aren't forced to listen to the person at that moment in time-- a chat line can be read instantly, or when you're done with what you're doing) conversations at the same time. To that end, most people don't even think about having group chats. They compartmentalize what they're doing into single units of required information, and then go to each person they need that unit from individually. Let's say you're having a party at Bob's place, Jill is bringing the food, and then you're meeting at the movie theatre at 6 beforehand. It's almost an ingrained reflex to converse with Bob in one chat window about cleaning up beforehand, while talking with Jill in window 2 about how many peppers to use, all while telling Alice and Eve to hold on while you hammer plans out in windows 3 and 4. And the thing is, while this seems inefficient, from the side of who needs to know what, it's actually simplified. Bob doesn't need to know what kind of peppers are going to be in the food in order to take care of what he's doing. Neither does Jill need to know the details of which cleaning crew is going to be at Bob's before the party. And all Alice and Eve want to know is which movie theatre it is and how late the party's going til. For the most part, 1-to-1 communication does what we need it to without being overwhelming (as the chat window would end up being if we had Alice, Bob, Eve, and Jill with us in the same IRC channel). Which isn't to say there aren't situations wherein having groups of people are useful. But those are generally defined as "meetings", and there's both explicit and unsaid rules that usually pertain to such things-- there's a point to the meeting, an agreement to not speak over each other, a meeting leader that has a syllabus to follow. You're not going to have 3 separate conversations going on where 2-3 people of the 10 at the table are talking across the table to each other during the meeting. And any meeting that doesn't have this sort of order imposed on it ends up being a waste of time, because no information gets passed on and nothing gets resolved. All you end up with is a mass of chaos wherein you have to tease bits of meaningful conversation out in a process roughly equivalent to trying to get a pair of headphones out of a ball of wire that's been sitting at the bottom of a desk drawer for a couple years. tl;dr: I don't think it's a software issue so much as it is a wetware issue-- meaningful unstructured communication gets exponentially more difficult when more people are involved.
• Mz 16y ago
  I believe group chat happens sometimes on a forum I have a membership with for people who are deathly ill and/or have deathly ill family members. Such people tend to have trouble getting out much and are willing to make the effort to do a group chat. They aren't going anywhere anyway. There are logistical problems with having an extended live online group discussion, like bathroom breaks and the need to eat or drink (and the need to signal people that you are going to the bathroom, something you don't have to explicitly state in person when you get up and head for the loo). There are reasons why IRL gatherings very often revolve around food or involve food: It's the best way to keep people together for an extended period of time. If there is no food, drink, or bathroom access, you have a pretty short time frame before people will start leaving to go meet those needs. Some group members have a much shorter chain in that regard (people with small kids in tow, elderly people, people with serious medical conditions) and that means that unless you have somehow established a core group of ridiculously hardy individuals who can go for long periods without eating, drinking, or going to the bathroom, your group isn't sustainable for long at all in the absence of such amenities. (Individuals who are that hardy are probably not much available for online group chat. They are at the pub or out hiking up some mountain or traveling in some foreign country without good internet access -- which is exactly where I would be much of the time if I weren't medically handicapped.)