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One and a half year ago, I built an (unofficial) bot, Ragebot [0], that would function as spam protection for the many bot accounts joining public Kik groups. T
by lemagedurage 7y ago
One and a half year ago, I built an (unofficial) bot, Ragebot [0], that would function as spam protection for the many bot accounts joining public Kik groups. The project took off and was added to hundreds of thousands of groups by Kik users.
Two days ago, Ted Livingston announced the closure and Kik has been chaos throughout ever since, with people adopting Discord and Telegram to retain their online friend circles.
One way in which Kik stood out from other popular chat clients was the ability to search for public groups. Even though this feature came with some amount of darkness, people could easily find peers with common interests and make friends.
It's a real shame that this platform has to go. At the moment not much information is available beyond Ted's original blog post, I hope more clarification will follow soon.
[0] https://ragebot.net https://ragebot.net
- landonxjames 7y ago>Even though this feature came with some amount of darkness I could guess at what you mean, but don't want to be wrong. Could you elaborate on what kind of darkness you were referring to?
- jachee 7y agoGroups of—shall we say—fringe interests of dubious (or outright extra-) legality.
- scoot 7y agoI'm confused. Not a Kik user, but how are public groups a unique feature (compared to say Subreddits)?
- injaki 7y agoOP meant searchable public group. In discord you need an invite link, and there's no way to search by its name.
- lytedev 7y agoBut I believe you can search for subreddits as well? The same is true on BAND with searchable, public, joinable communities.
- harry8 7y agoso exactly like irc only not irc, which makes it better because, um..?
- xmprt 7y agoIf you think this is exactly like IRC then you're delusional.
- harry8 7y agoI'm not sure that response is as helpful as you think it is. I'm pretty sure irc has searchable public groups fwiw. Pretty sure irc is text based group chat. If there's something that kik gets you beyond irc it's completely unclear from this discussion what that might be. Whether or not I'm delusional, and I sure I am as delusional as anyone about certain things, your response isn't useful, informative, helpful or kind. But YMMV.
- tastroder 7y agoI mean, they had a shiny app, marketing, and I'd guess similar features the young target group appreciated. A lot of things are like IRC but preferred by the new generation. People don't often select apps based on their backend stack.
- 333c 7y ago(At least some) groups on Telegram are searchable.
- nyberg 7y agoMatrix groups are searchable and (at least riot) makes it relatively simple.
- baroffoos 7y agoSearchable groups are an antifeature to me. They encourage random strangers to come and go which prevents ever building any sense of community. One of the things I like about the group chats I am in are that the same people are there from years ago.
- taurath 7y agoYou can still have private groups. It’s nice to have “public” endpoints at least.
- feanaro 7y agoI don't know... It's sometimes nice to be able to meet random strangers instead of remaining in your own filtered little bubble. My formative years were spent on IRC like a few of the other commenters here and I would judge that as a strictly positive experience.
- buboard 7y agoyep, IRC comes to mind as the ultimate walk down an endless street of strangers. It has its place
- rolltiide 7y agoPublic groups in the way Telegram lets you search super groups and announcement channels? Or was it different
- buboard 7y agoThere are now multiple apps with lots of private groups. I wonder if a directory of groups like this is useful http://groupchathub.com/ http://groupchathub.com/