19 ms·

I built that “so-and-so is typing” feature in chat (2014)

62 points by wlkr 6y ago

JoeAltmaier 6y ago
Yeah Yahoo IM had that, but they used different servers for the 'activity' messages and the actual text. So you could get the "typing" indication after you had received the message. It was often out of order, and very confusing. Our message app (Sococo) was rigorous about sending activity messages, from peer to peer. Not periodically; just when typing began or 'timed out', or when focus was gained or lost (desktop app). So a minimum of messages got sent, not the barrage of ping-style message the other guys sent.
- J5892 6y ago
  Near the end of Yahoo Messenger, they were planning on releasing live-typing as the default, with no option to turn it off (the other person saw what you were typing as you typed it). I don't remember if it actually made it into production, but it was rolled out to employees for dogfooding. It was the worst thing ever, especially since we were forced to use it for internal communications.
grawprog 6y ago
>I’d rather know what the other person were typing as she typed it. >And it used to be that I did. Long before instant messaging programs even existed, there was a Unix program for chatting called “talk” (and variations like “ytalk” and “ntalk”). The interface was not like that of chat programs today, where you type a message in the bottom, then hit Enter to send it over the wire to your friend. Instead, talk split the screen in half and transmitted everything you typed letter by letter. If you typed something and then deleted it, your friend would see the whole gaffe. Your text and your friend’s text were never combined into sequence. I have to admit, i'm not sure if I share the author's enthusiasm for such a system. It would be heavily dependent on who i'm talking to. If this were the default way of messaging with no other options, this would get a hard no from me. But, with certain people in certain situations, a modern version of this would actually be pretty nice. Still, I wish overall there were more options for disabling things like typing indicators, read reports, constant online status indicators altogether. My biggest problem isn't so much their existence, but the inability to fully disable them in most cases.
- lotsofpulp 6y ago
  Email is all of that disabled.
  - boogies 6y ago
    (as long as you your client doesn’t load tracking pixels wrong) Edit: the article: “Gmail tells you if your friend is typing, and whether there’s any text left in the box.”
    - snazz 6y ago
      Doesn't Gmail load and proxy all external images anyway? Am I remembering wrong? Of course, not everyone uses Gmail, but if it loads all images whether or not they're opened, tracking pixels are much less useful.
      - boogies 6y ago
        IIRC their servers cache them the first time you open an email, only preventing them from triggering again if you open the email more than once EDIT: it looks like it doesn’t even do that, and “might even benefit email marketing, for sure not blow it up” if this isn’t out of date: https://blog.filippo.io/how-the-new-gmail-image-proxy-works-and-what-this-means-for-you/#bonusthearstechnicaarticle https://blog.filippo.io/how-the-new-gmail-image-proxy-works-...
  - Scoundreller 6y ago
    I wish email supported this at the corporate level. It wastes time when someone sends an email to a team of 5 people and they’re all independently working on the same reply.
- dguo 6y ago
  I loved this feature when I first experienced it in Google Wave. I don't think it belongs everywhere, but exactly as the article author says, it makes the conversation feel smoother and more like I am actually talking to someone in real life because I can think about what they are saying as they are typing it. In a real life conversation, you digest in real time as you hear the other person. You don't have to wait for chunks of their thoughts.
vernie 6y ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VdMjqcjMVTc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VdMjqcjMVTc
Baeocystin 6y ago
I hated the behavior then, I hate it now, and will continue to despise it in the future. I am not being hyperbolic in my adjective choice. I have seen real work drama over this sort of thing, because people misinterpret the 'is-typing' as 'is-paying-attention-to-me', and the inevitable long delays, short replies, forced focusing on waiting for someone to finish... It is an anti-social antipattern from beginning to end.
- infogulch 6y ago
  I think a big part of the problem is that the feature's implementation doesn't always align with the author's intended drafting / published status. The feature just picks the closest outcome that happens to be measurable (e.g. "author typed in draft box in the last 0.5s" or "draft box is not empty string") without regarding how a notification of that measure maps to the social dynamics of IM communication.
  - marketingPro 6y ago
    I run a popular website and people find me on various social media accounts. People usually ask questions or give feedback. I cannot reply to all of them right away. I may be able to reply nightly with a major reduction in productivity. I know the "seen" is a real issue. Most of the time I need to think about it. And me personally, I'm offended if someone "sees" my message and doesn't respond. I'm sure others do too, even if I respond within 1 week. The internet is not IRL. I manage more relationships than would be possible.
- fimdomeio 6y ago
  Both that and the read status destroyed the charm of chat to me. Before I could be fast or take 2 days to answer but it would mean that I would take my time to do a proper answer. Now it means I'll ignore messages for a bigger period because I don't want the other person to see that I read them, and then I'll right much faster because I don't want to person to see 6 interrupted "... is typing".
  - nicbou 6y ago
czzr 6y ago
As often, xkcd nailed it: https://xkcd.com/1886/ https://xkcd.com/1886/
orev 6y ago
It makes you feel like once you start typing something, you have to at least send something, even if you change your mind about replying. And I’m always skeptical of these “I invented it” type posts. The talk command on Unix actually allowed you to see what the other person was typing in real time, letter by letter.
- hkon 6y ago
  Yes, used to feel like that. Now I have become numb. To everyones frustration except myself.
- leetcrew 6y ago
  > The talk command on Unix actually allowed you to see what the other person was typing in real time, letter by letter. the author mentions this in the article.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- redis_mlc 6y ago
  > And I’m always skeptical of these “I invented it” type posts. FYI: I know most of the celebrity nerds in Silicon Valley, and generally the technical origin stories you hear about are actually true. The most inaccurate stories are around who cofounders are - one is invariably "left out" later on. (See the recent reddit news.) Because of my knowledge of above, when I worked at a unicorn and saw a slide listing 4 cofounders, and asked where the 4th one was, got silence. :)
rzzzt 6y ago
Skype's "cat is typing" animation when a bunch of keys are held down was cute, though. Who did that one?
x87678r 6y ago
I dont mind that, what drives me nuts is the people who say "hi", then wait for you to say "hi", then they start typing the message they wanted to send, taking 5 minutes to write a short essay, while you're sitting there distracted and waiting.
- MereInterest 6y ago
  Each time that they do, have an auto reply set up to respond with https://www.nohello.com/2013/01/please-dont-say-just-hello-in-chat.html https://www.nohello.com/2013/01/please-dont-say-just-hello-i... ?
  - x87678r 6y ago
    Nice. https://www.nohello.com/ https://www.nohello.com/ is easier to remember, I'll start doing this.
    - jobigoud 6y ago
      Yeah they should redesign that website to be a single simple page with the content of that unique blog post. It's a bit ironic that they don't get straight to the point.
      - MereInterest 6y ago
        Looks like the desktop version goes straight to the point, but the mobile version doesn't.
  - yesenadam 6y ago
    I like it. But in the second example they've already finished typing the whole question by the time they said Hi in the first.. then we're told the second way finishes "minutes sooner"? Hmm. That appears to make no sense. Not wasting the other person's time is however super-important, and a great fast test of whether someone is considerate enough to be an online friend or not.
  - 6y ago
floren 6y ago
I seem to remember that on one of the chat services, there was a trick to see what the other person was typing before they hit Enter. Something like the client actually sent updates as the other user typed, and your client would receive it, but not display it until the message was marked "sent"... but third-party clients could just show you the in-progress messages. Anyone remember this?
- Scoundreller 6y ago
  Not that, but similar: an MSN messenger clone would pop up a window once someone else opened a chat window with you, before they sent a message. Was fun to say “hi” while someone was writing an initial message to you. Dunno why I told my friend that her sister often opened a window (to see my picture presumably) without ever sending a word...
- alternatetwo 6y ago
  Pidgin has a psychic mode plugin, that would open a window from the sender as if they had sent a message, while they were typing. I used it mainly for icq, it was quite funny surprising people with it.
marketingPro 6y ago
In all fairness to the Author, people make up excuses for their behavior to justify it. He may actually be deeply conflicted but this is a defense mechanism.
- prohobo 6y ago
  That's what this feels like. There's a lot wrong with online social features... points at the global echo chambers, the depression and anxiety epidemic, the broken dating scene, and toxicity of online discourse I don't blame the people that made it, they're innovators that quite literally had no idea what they were doing - or the bottom line of the stakeholders got in the way. So, in my opinion the author did nothing wrong, and has no reason to apologize. However, it would be nice to start a conversation on how to fix these problems instead of pretending they're not there. HN made some great choices in its features that makes it a much better place to read and engage in comments than probably 99% of the rest of the internet. Those innovations include small things like not being able to downvote direct replies to your comments, having downvoting locked behind a reputation score, etc. It seems like these features were added intuitively, which is fine but risky. The author mentions that essentially, the problem with their feature is that it doesn't go far enough. I'd like to ask them how they've come to that conclusion. Do they just assume that? Did they do research? We really have no idea how to build new forms of communication. The only other ubiquitous forms, besides what we've evolved with, are writing and telephone communication. Both of those have their awkwardness, and therefore have established rules to make communication go more smoothly. Writing has had millennia to iron itself out, and we mostly got lucky with telephones but there definitely are still problems with it. The internet and all related technologies are a revolution in communication, yet no one has considered that maybe, just maybe, we need to really take care to do it properly? Where are the institutions and committees for research and creation of standards that make sure to foster at least healthier communication online?
scubbo 6y ago
This doesn't bother me at all. It's the person who invented Read Receipts that really needs to apologize.
- floren 6y ago
  On the other hand, I want to buy a beer for whoever invented "email recall" messages, because they have given me a great deal of entertainment over the years. Pretty much the only way to get me to read one of the constant HR/Health & Wellness/Safety/whatever emails that deluged us in my previous job... if I see a recall message, I'm going through the original with a fine-toothed comb.
silveroriole 6y ago
I don’t mind this behaviour. It can be difficult to coordinate when you don’t know whether the other person is done yet or not. Back in the old days we used to, as the end of the article says, send lots of little bits of text to deal with this (to older/less internet-savvy people’s great annoyance, as they treated chat just like email, and would be furious when their wall of text was responded to with half a sentence!) but it made the chat very disjointed and you’d end up having to deal with multiple simultaneous stands of conversation. Anyway, the real problem is people who ask “what were you typing?” when you delete your message or take a long time. You don’t want to know! I’ve never used a ‘live’ chat like he describes but I really like the idea. Is there anything modern that provides that?
- throwaway287391 6y ago
  > Anyway, the real problem is people who ask “what were you typing?” when you delete your message. That seems so rude to me! I've never actually had this happen to me, but I nonetheless fear it will 100% of the time I start typing something and then delete it. In any IM application that has a typing indicator (especially Slack at work -- I shudder at the thought of typing out a long message in #general), I've taken to drafting messages that require any non-trivial degree of thought to type in a separate box, e.g. a message to myself, and then copy-pasting it into the actual chat.
  - silveroriole 6y ago
    Sorry for sniping your reply with an edit. Part of why I don’t like people asking what I was typing - I’m a compulsive redrafter of posts!
  - kqr 6y ago
    Here's what I do: I disable the typing notification locally whenever possible (for example in Slack). Since I'm never reminded of its existence, I honestly had completely forgotten it existed. Makes things much easier. Sure, other people still see that I type stuff, but this in and of itself is rarely the problem for me. My problem is my anxiety around knowing they get a notification when I'm typing. That goes away when I don't see that others are typing.
NicolasGorden 6y ago
I find it interesting that when I was growing up, the person who invented the typing notification feature would have presented it as an achievement. Now these articles start with him taking the 'blame'. It feels so... like a new world... where most people are offended and angry by every tiny little annoyance of modern life. Where being angry and pessimistic is almost fashionable. Complaining about life, feeling hopeless, prophesizing disaster and externalizing problems is something people do to 'brag'. I feel schools should include a decent amount of volunteering with people who have real problems. Maybe that way the next generation won't be so quick to focus on the negative. We're living in the best of times by all objective measurements.
- dudul 6y ago
  I'm pretty sure every single generation in History thought they were the greatest generation in History.
  - rsynnott 6y ago
    And that the one after was the worst. Moaning about the youth today goes back to at least the ancient Greeks. Moaning about the one before is also popular. I have a pet theory that the reason that we hear so much about the offences of the boomers and millennials is that leadership positions are mostly gen x right now (when did you last hear anything about gen x?) In a couple of decades everyone will be complaining about gen x and gen z, instead.
- rsynnott 6y ago
  Being annoyed by small things isn’t a recent invention. For instance, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/They%27ll_Do_It_Every_Time https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/They%27ll_Do_It_Every_Time
ricardobeat 6y ago
ICQ also had the 'real time typing' years earlier. It felt pretty normal at the time!
borplk 6y ago
Just from reading the title I expected this was going to be a "... and I'm sorry" article.
nixpulvis 6y ago
Back when I worked at Apple, I opened a somewhat detailed issue against the messaging application trying to explain some of the mental health implications of "the dot dot dots". Sadly, the issue was moved somewhere I didn't have access, and surely ignored. I quit that stupid job. P.S. I still believe (... though it may be overly complex) that a group of users should be able to opt-in to this mode. But by default, and perhaps on a timeout, it is disabled.

62 points by wlkr 6y ago

Yeah Yahoo IM had that, but they used different servers for the 'activity' messages and the actual text. So you could get the "typing" indication after you had received the message. It was often out of order, and very confusing. Our message app (Sococo) was rigorous about sending activity messages, from peer to peer. Not periodically; just when typing began or 'timed out', or when focus was gained or lost (desktop app). So a minimum of messages got sent, not the barrage of ping-style message the other guys sent.

J5892 6y ago
Near the end of Yahoo Messenger, they were planning on releasing live-typing as the default, with no option to turn it off (the other person saw what you were typing as you typed it). I don't remember if it actually made it into production, but it was rolled out to employees for dogfooding. It was the worst thing ever, especially since we were forced to use it for internal communications.

grawprog 6y ago

>I’d rather know what the other person were typing as she typed it. >And it used to be that I did. Long before instant messaging programs even existed, there was a Unix program for chatting called “talk” (and variations like “ytalk” and “ntalk”). The interface was not like that of chat programs today, where you type a message in the bottom, then hit Enter to send it over the wire to your friend. Instead, talk split the screen in half and transmitted everything you typed letter by letter. If you typed something and then deleted it, your friend would see the whole gaffe. Your text and your friend’s text were never combined into sequence. I have to admit, i'm not sure if I share the author's enthusiasm for such a system. It would be heavily dependent on who i'm talking to. If this were the default way of messaging with no other options, this would get a hard no from me. But, with certain people in certain situations, a modern version of this would actually be pretty nice. Still, I wish overall there were more options for disabling things like typing indicators, read reports, constant online status indicators altogether. My biggest problem isn't so much their existence, but the inability to fully disable them in most cases.

lotsofpulp 6y ago
Email is all of that disabled.
- boogies 6y ago
  (as long as you your client doesn’t load tracking pixels wrong) Edit: the article: “Gmail tells you if your friend is typing, and whether there’s any text left in the box.”
  - snazz 6y ago
    Doesn't Gmail load and proxy all external images anyway? Am I remembering wrong? Of course, not everyone uses Gmail, but if it loads all images whether or not they're opened, tracking pixels are much less useful.
    - boogies 6y ago
      IIRC their servers cache them the first time you open an email, only preventing them from triggering again if you open the email more than once EDIT: it looks like it doesn’t even do that, and “might even benefit email marketing, for sure not blow it up” if this isn’t out of date: https://blog.filippo.io/how-the-new-gmail-image-proxy-works-and-what-this-means-for-you/#bonusthearstechnicaarticle https://blog.filippo.io/how-the-new-gmail-image-proxy-works-...
- Scoundreller 6y ago
  I wish email supported this at the corporate level. It wastes time when someone sends an email to a team of 5 people and they’re all independently working on the same reply.
dguo 6y ago
I loved this feature when I first experienced it in Google Wave. I don't think it belongs everywhere, but exactly as the article author says, it makes the conversation feel smoother and more like I am actually talking to someone in real life because I can think about what they are saying as they are typing it. In a real life conversation, you digest in real time as you hear the other person. You don't have to wait for chunks of their thoughts.

vernie 6y ago

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VdMjqcjMVTc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VdMjqcjMVTc

Baeocystin 6y ago

I hated the behavior then, I hate it now, and will continue to despise it in the future. I am not being hyperbolic in my adjective choice. I have seen real work drama over this sort of thing, because people misinterpret the 'is-typing' as 'is-paying-attention-to-me', and the inevitable long delays, short replies, forced focusing on waiting for someone to finish... It is an anti-social antipattern from beginning to end.

infogulch 6y ago
I think a big part of the problem is that the feature's implementation doesn't always align with the author's intended drafting / published status. The feature just picks the closest outcome that happens to be measurable (e.g. "author typed in draft box in the last 0.5s" or "draft box is not empty string") without regarding how a notification of that measure maps to the social dynamics of IM communication.
- marketingPro 6y ago
  I run a popular website and people find me on various social media accounts. People usually ask questions or give feedback. I cannot reply to all of them right away. I may be able to reply nightly with a major reduction in productivity. I know the "seen" is a real issue. Most of the time I need to think about it. And me personally, I'm offended if someone "sees" my message and doesn't respond. I'm sure others do too, even if I respond within 1 week. The internet is not IRL. I manage more relationships than would be possible.
fimdomeio 6y ago
Both that and the read status destroyed the charm of chat to me. Before I could be fast or take 2 days to answer but it would mean that I would take my time to do a proper answer. Now it means I'll ignore messages for a bigger period because I don't want the other person to see that I read them, and then I'll right much faster because I don't want to person to see 6 interrupted "... is typing".
- nicbou 6y ago

czzr 6y ago

As often, xkcd nailed it: https://xkcd.com/1886/ https://xkcd.com/1886/

orev 6y ago

It makes you feel like once you start typing something, you have to at least send something, even if you change your mind about replying. And I’m always skeptical of these “I invented it” type posts. The talk command on Unix actually allowed you to see what the other person was typing in real time, letter by letter.

hkon 6y ago
Yes, used to feel like that. Now I have become numb. To everyones frustration except myself.
leetcrew 6y ago
> The talk command on Unix actually allowed you to see what the other person was typing in real time, letter by letter. the author mentions this in the article.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
redis_mlc 6y ago
> And I’m always skeptical of these “I invented it” type posts. FYI: I know most of the celebrity nerds in Silicon Valley, and generally the technical origin stories you hear about are actually true. The most inaccurate stories are around who cofounders are - one is invariably "left out" later on. (See the recent reddit news.) Because of my knowledge of above, when I worked at a unicorn and saw a slide listing 4 cofounders, and asked where the 4th one was, got silence. :)

rzzzt 6y ago

Skype's "cat is typing" animation when a bunch of keys are held down was cute, though. Who did that one?

x87678r 6y ago

I dont mind that, what drives me nuts is the people who say "hi", then wait for you to say "hi", then they start typing the message they wanted to send, taking 5 minutes to write a short essay, while you're sitting there distracted and waiting.

MereInterest 6y ago
Each time that they do, have an auto reply set up to respond with https://www.nohello.com/2013/01/please-dont-say-just-hello-in-chat.html https://www.nohello.com/2013/01/please-dont-say-just-hello-i... ?
- x87678r 6y ago
  Nice. https://www.nohello.com/ https://www.nohello.com/ is easier to remember, I'll start doing this.
  - jobigoud 6y ago
    Yeah they should redesign that website to be a single simple page with the content of that unique blog post. It's a bit ironic that they don't get straight to the point.
    - MereInterest 6y ago
      Looks like the desktop version goes straight to the point, but the mobile version doesn't.
- yesenadam 6y ago
  I like it. But in the second example they've already finished typing the whole question by the time they said Hi in the first.. then we're told the second way finishes "minutes sooner"? Hmm. That appears to make no sense. Not wasting the other person's time is however super-important, and a great fast test of whether someone is considerate enough to be an online friend or not.
- 6y ago

floren 6y ago

I seem to remember that on one of the chat services, there was a trick to see what the other person was typing before they hit Enter. Something like the client actually sent updates as the other user typed, and your client would receive it, but not display it until the message was marked "sent"... but third-party clients could just show you the in-progress messages. Anyone remember this?

Scoundreller 6y ago
Not that, but similar: an MSN messenger clone would pop up a window once someone else opened a chat window with you, before they sent a message. Was fun to say “hi” while someone was writing an initial message to you. Dunno why I told my friend that her sister often opened a window (to see my picture presumably) without ever sending a word...
alternatetwo 6y ago
Pidgin has a psychic mode plugin, that would open a window from the sender as if they had sent a message, while they were typing. I used it mainly for icq, it was quite funny surprising people with it.

marketingPro 6y ago

In all fairness to the Author, people make up excuses for their behavior to justify it. He may actually be deeply conflicted but this is a defense mechanism.

prohobo 6y ago
That's what this feels like. There's a lot wrong with online social features... points at the global echo chambers, the depression and anxiety epidemic, the broken dating scene, and toxicity of online discourse I don't blame the people that made it, they're innovators that quite literally had no idea what they were doing - or the bottom line of the stakeholders got in the way. So, in my opinion the author did nothing wrong, and has no reason to apologize. However, it would be nice to start a conversation on how to fix these problems instead of pretending they're not there. HN made some great choices in its features that makes it a much better place to read and engage in comments than probably 99% of the rest of the internet. Those innovations include small things like not being able to downvote direct replies to your comments, having downvoting locked behind a reputation score, etc. It seems like these features were added intuitively, which is fine but risky. The author mentions that essentially, the problem with their feature is that it doesn't go far enough. I'd like to ask them how they've come to that conclusion. Do they just assume that? Did they do research? We really have no idea how to build new forms of communication. The only other ubiquitous forms, besides what we've evolved with, are writing and telephone communication. Both of those have their awkwardness, and therefore have established rules to make communication go more smoothly. Writing has had millennia to iron itself out, and we mostly got lucky with telephones but there definitely are still problems with it. The internet and all related technologies are a revolution in communication, yet no one has considered that maybe, just maybe, we need to really take care to do it properly? Where are the institutions and committees for research and creation of standards that make sure to foster at least healthier communication online?

scubbo 6y ago

This doesn't bother me at all. It's the person who invented Read Receipts that really needs to apologize.

floren 6y ago
On the other hand, I want to buy a beer for whoever invented "email recall" messages, because they have given me a great deal of entertainment over the years. Pretty much the only way to get me to read one of the constant HR/Health & Wellness/Safety/whatever emails that deluged us in my previous job... if I see a recall message, I'm going through the original with a fine-toothed comb.

silveroriole 6y ago

I don’t mind this behaviour. It can be difficult to coordinate when you don’t know whether the other person is done yet or not. Back in the old days we used to, as the end of the article says, send lots of little bits of text to deal with this (to older/less internet-savvy people’s great annoyance, as they treated chat just like email, and would be furious when their wall of text was responded to with half a sentence!) but it made the chat very disjointed and you’d end up having to deal with multiple simultaneous stands of conversation. Anyway, the real problem is people who ask “what were you typing?” when you delete your message or take a long time. You don’t want to know! I’ve never used a ‘live’ chat like he describes but I really like the idea. Is there anything modern that provides that?

throwaway287391 6y ago
> Anyway, the real problem is people who ask “what were you typing?” when you delete your message. That seems so rude to me! I've never actually had this happen to me, but I nonetheless fear it will 100% of the time I start typing something and then delete it. In any IM application that has a typing indicator (especially Slack at work -- I shudder at the thought of typing out a long message in #general), I've taken to drafting messages that require any non-trivial degree of thought to type in a separate box, e.g. a message to myself, and then copy-pasting it into the actual chat.
- silveroriole 6y ago
  Sorry for sniping your reply with an edit. Part of why I don’t like people asking what I was typing - I’m a compulsive redrafter of posts!
- kqr 6y ago
  Here's what I do: I disable the typing notification locally whenever possible (for example in Slack). Since I'm never reminded of its existence, I honestly had completely forgotten it existed. Makes things much easier. Sure, other people still see that I type stuff, but this in and of itself is rarely the problem for me. My problem is my anxiety around knowing they get a notification when I'm typing. That goes away when I don't see that others are typing.

NicolasGorden 6y ago

I find it interesting that when I was growing up, the person who invented the typing notification feature would have presented it as an achievement. Now these articles start with him taking the 'blame'. It feels so... like a new world... where most people are offended and angry by every tiny little annoyance of modern life. Where being angry and pessimistic is almost fashionable. Complaining about life, feeling hopeless, prophesizing disaster and externalizing problems is something people do to 'brag'. I feel schools should include a decent amount of volunteering with people who have real problems. Maybe that way the next generation won't be so quick to focus on the negative. We're living in the best of times by all objective measurements.

dudul 6y ago
I'm pretty sure every single generation in History thought they were the greatest generation in History.
- rsynnott 6y ago
  And that the one after was the worst. Moaning about the youth today goes back to at least the ancient Greeks. Moaning about the one before is also popular. I have a pet theory that the reason that we hear so much about the offences of the boomers and millennials is that leadership positions are mostly gen x right now (when did you last hear anything about gen x?) In a couple of decades everyone will be complaining about gen x and gen z, instead.
rsynnott 6y ago
Being annoyed by small things isn’t a recent invention. For instance, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/They%27ll_Do_It_Every_Time https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/They%27ll_Do_It_Every_Time

ricardobeat 6y ago

ICQ also had the 'real time typing' years earlier. It felt pretty normal at the time!

borplk 6y ago

Just from reading the title I expected this was going to be a "... and I'm sorry" article.

nixpulvis 6y ago

Back when I worked at Apple, I opened a somewhat detailed issue against the messaging application trying to explain some of the mental health implications of "the dot dot dots". Sadly, the issue was moved somewhere I didn't have access, and surely ignored. I quit that stupid job. P.S. I still believe (... though it may be overly complex) that a group of users should be able to opt-in to this mode. But by default, and perhaps on a timeout, it is disabled.