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I think the reason chat applications like Discord or Slack, are usually a clusterfuck, is because the people using them are not used to have an organized conver

I think the reason chat applications like Discord or Slack, are usually a clusterfuck, is because the people using them are not used to have an organized conversation. They are used to talk about everything without thinking about it too much. IRC has also the same model and people usually stay on topic, because that's what they are used to, it's on their culture. The same goes for other forms of communication, if it is old enough to survive, it'll have a culture around them and newcomers will have to adapt to the old ones if they want to be part of the community. Doesn't matter if we reinvent the wheel once again, if you can't discuss about something staying on topic the chat room is going to become a mess in a couple of minutes if there are more than 10 persons involved. You can have 50 different rooms for different topics but people go where there are other people talking (nobody wants to talk in an empty room), you need to moderate those rooms but at one point you can be there 24 hours a day if you had just created your chat group for fun.

bigiain 6y ago
> I think the reason chat applications like Discord or Slack, are usually a clusterfuck, is because the people using them are not used to have an organized conversation. But those same people deal just fine in a group of 20 friends at a bar, where they naturally break out into several distinct conversations with the people close by, and move to be closer to other people if they want to bet part of a different conversation. Discord/Slack/et al. force everybody to be "that guy" who shouts across half a dozen people to join in a conversation at the other end of the table. There have been a few projects I've seen where people are trying to do video chat in virtual 3d spaces with sound localisation based on your avatars proximity to other users, which I think is an interesting approach, but I don't have any ideas about how to make that "localisation" thing work in a text chat context, apart from the not very useful "exploding number of slack channels" solution... In a chunk of my friend groups - "ephemeral Signal chats with disappearing messages set to 1 hour or 1 day" gets used fairly successfully, where a side conversation can be taken out of the "main group chat" with the intention of it _not_ becoming an ongoing new group chat. It's still way more friction than turning round on a bar still and joining the conversation on the other side though...

bigiain 6y ago

> I think the reason chat applications like Discord or Slack, are usually a clusterfuck, is because the people using them are not used to have an organized conversation. But those same people deal just fine in a group of 20 friends at a bar, where they naturally break out into several distinct conversations with the people close by, and move to be closer to other people if they want to bet part of a different conversation. Discord/Slack/et al. force everybody to be "that guy" who shouts across half a dozen people to join in a conversation at the other end of the table. There have been a few projects I've seen where people are trying to do video chat in virtual 3d spaces with sound localisation based on your avatars proximity to other users, which I think is an interesting approach, but I don't have any ideas about how to make that "localisation" thing work in a text chat context, apart from the not very useful "exploding number of slack channels" solution... In a chunk of my friend groups - "ephemeral Signal chats with disappearing messages set to 1 hour or 1 day" gets used fairly successfully, where a side conversation can be taken out of the "main group chat" with the intention of it _not_ becoming an ongoing new group chat. It's still way more friction than turning round on a bar still and joining the conversation on the other side though...