3 ms·

Chat isn’t asynchronous. It’s semi-synchronous. It’s hard to have a conversation with someone who is not entirely “there”, and so read indicators give you some

Chat isn’t asynchronous. It’s semi-synchronous. It’s hard to have a conversation with someone who is not entirely “there”, and so read indicators give you some hints as to their current level of presence.

gumby271 4y ago
That's very true, asynchronous isn't a fair way to describe things. But given a hint about their level of presence, what are you doing with that information? What can you do after sending the message you were already going to send? Worst case it makes people send "???" as a follow up because they can see I'm coherent enough to tap a notification and assume that means I'm available for a full conversation. The opposite example is the typing indicator, which acts as a useful mechanism to keep a conversation ordered and flowing once it's started. Maybe an argument could be made for the "currently viewing" indicator being more useful, since it solves the problem of indicating I'm available for a conversation better than just "read y/n".
- comte7092 4y ago
  1. Dismiss the notification instead of opening it. 2. Before read receipts, I used to get very anxious about whether I was being ignored, now I can see that the other person simply hasn’t seen the message. Was that a personal problem? Yes, and frankly it probably would be significantly less of an issue now that I’m older.
guestbest 4y ago
Before everyone seemed to migrate to txt messages and iMessage style apps like WhatsApp the only chat app that had a pounce feature for someone offline was ICQ. The paradise of messaging mail was incorporated with chats and thus a common saved history retrieved from a server was normalized. Chat from the IRC days was seen as more of a p2p application with a relay in between. If a user node didn’t exist the user object couldn’t receive messages

3 ms·

Chat isn’t asynchronous. It’s semi-synchronous. It’s hard to have a conversation with someone who is not entirely “there”, and so read indicators give you some

by zarzavat 4y ago

gumby271 4y ago
That's very true, asynchronous isn't a fair way to describe things. But given a hint about their level of presence, what are you doing with that information? What can you do after sending the message you were already going to send? Worst case it makes people send "???" as a follow up because they can see I'm coherent enough to tap a notification and assume that means I'm available for a full conversation. The opposite example is the typing indicator, which acts as a useful mechanism to keep a conversation ordered and flowing once it's started. Maybe an argument could be made for the "currently viewing" indicator being more useful, since it solves the problem of indicating I'm available for a conversation better than just "read y/n".
- comte7092 4y ago
  1. Dismiss the notification instead of opening it. 2. Before read receipts, I used to get very anxious about whether I was being ignored, now I can see that the other person simply hasn’t seen the message. Was that a personal problem? Yes, and frankly it probably would be significantly less of an issue now that I’m older.
guestbest 4y ago
Before everyone seemed to migrate to txt messages and iMessage style apps like WhatsApp the only chat app that had a pounce feature for someone offline was ICQ. The paradise of messaging mail was incorporated with chats and thus a common saved history retrieved from a server was normalized. Chat from the IRC days was seen as more of a p2p application with a relay in between. If a user node didn’t exist the user object couldn’t receive messages