> 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 conv

> 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...