12 ms·

Group chats rule the world

267 points by srid 2y ago

priyanshuchauha 2y ago
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oldpersonintx 2y ago
[dead]
pigscantfly 2y ago
This is a very real take on where memes 'start' nowadays in the valley.
rvrs 2y ago
Once again an SV investor congratulates themselves on figuring out something that any teenager could've told you
- woah 2y ago
  Is it wrong to write about something?
  - zarathustreal 2y ago
    If you’re 10+ years late to discover it, best to leave that article in the drafts
pphysch 2y ago
See also "influencer cabals" that specifically manipulate social media platforms, usually organized in group chats on the same platform.
- throwadobe 2y ago
  at this point many are managed by agencies which can play that game on their own without even needing said influencers to knowingly and willingly collude
- Adachi91 2y ago
  This is prominent in all engagement circles. A few months ago I somehow stumbled into a sex workers chat and it was filled with "Need boosts" and "I mod X, Y, Z subreddit and can get you verified and submission accepted faster". Engagement systems are awful imo, they've always been able to be gamed via click farms but most places can filter through inorganic engagement from mobile click farms in a single region, the "cheap" ones at least.
deadbabe 2y ago
A friend of a friend of mine showed me a group chat she was in of billionaires and millionaires daughters. Wow.
- irrational 2y ago
  Please tell more. How was it different than a normal group chat?
  - deadbabe 2y ago
    Aside from the usual luxury pics, planning trips and events, pics with celebrities, and high society gossip and boiling hot tea, these women are very sexual. Nearly all are married but of course that doesn’t stop them from having their men on the side. A lot of these men look like male models and the chat is littered with nude pics showing off how very well endowed they are. If you’re very good looking with good social status packing 9 inches or more you could have a chance.
    - fullstick 2y ago
      Why would I want a chance with them anyway?
    - elevatedastalt 2y ago
      > 9 inches or more Ah, we are talking of internet inches I guess? The vast vast vast majority of men don't have 9" inches or more.
      - kortilla 2y ago
        Yes, being rich affords you access to the right side of the bell curve
        astrange 2y ago
        This is even worse phrasing than when people say "order of magnitude more" and mean "more", because it makes you think everything is normally distributed, but it isn't.
Muromec 2y ago
A secret society without its own special hats, hand guestures and e2e encrypted chat platform just doesn’t take itself seriously
clpm4j 2y ago
I used to be involved in several, highly active group chats. Over time these effectively became a concentrated form of social media, i.e. mostly a distraction and waste of time.
- subpixel 2y ago
  I'm on exactly one group chat. Hell that's enough!
- brnt 2y ago
  I remember I first installed WhatsApp back in, o, 2013? I had held off for a long time, but I had just moved abroad and beggers can't be choosers. I was added to a group chat within 24 hours, and in the following 24 hours I watched all the pointless chatter and I deleted WhatsApp. I'm on Signal now, and the number of groups are under control.
dudus 2y ago
I see all kinds of small communities related to programming languages, YouTube creator, frontend frameworks, ... These look fun but I never have time to engage one for long enough to feel like I belong there as a member of that community opposed to just a temporary visitor. I noticed that Discord is usually the platform of choice but I can see some using other platforms, the platform doesn't really matter much, and it's nice to know you can always drop by to ask questions. But for some reason when it's Discord I imagine it's only kids on the other side, for better or worse. "I love inside jokes. I hope to be a part of one someday" -- Michael Scott
denysvitali 2y ago
It could be cool to have an HN Telegram group
- cubefox 2y ago
  We are far too many: > members forever without decreasing quality. Over time, the group decays in quality and I often find groups with >100 members unsustainable. Though there could be a decently small group chat for sufficiently ancient users.
  - all2 2y ago
    We could do cohorts by hashing user uds and bucketing.
    - cubefox 2y ago
      Good idea!
- localfirst 2y ago
  don't see it working out tbh what HN does really well is manage pseudonyms and its low friction of signing up invites bullies/marketers/trolls dang and mod teams have done a fantastic job should put out some sort of "community management science" its tough to build a community from scratch (gone are the days of registering a niche domain + phpBB). you can fake it to a certain degree.
- sneak 2y ago
  Telegram isn’t end to end encrypted and you should uninstall it from your device.
  - denysvitali 2y ago
    Neither is HN, should I stop using it too? Btw, Telegram is E2E encrypted opt-in
    - 2y ago
kelseyfrog 2y ago
On shared rituals, the ones I like the most are 1. Good mornings. Where it's a norm to post "Good morning" or equivalent at the start of your day. It signals that you're continuing to participate and value the group. 2. @Welcomes. When a new member joins, they are @-ed with a welcome message by the users currently present. It helps expand the join->engage funnel. Some groups have a lot of people show up and then never participate. 3. Wednesday, My Dudes. Where the group plays participates in the same weekly ritual of wishing each other a happy Wednesday. See also: Today Is Friday In California. In my experience, it's easy to introduce these into a group simply by modeling them. After a week or two of consistent behavior, someone else, and then many others will join in. Obviously one has to read the room first and get a sense it's the right ritual for the group.
- scrollaway 2y ago
  > Good mornings. Where it's a norm to post "Good morning" or equivalent at the start of your day Those a certain age will remember UGT ("Universal Greeting Time") from IRC. It's always morning when you enter the channel, always evening when you leave.
- adapt_and_laugh 2y ago
  This might just be me, but I actually hate these things. They always feel forced and corny and seeing the notification in a channel and thinking it is something interesting only to have it be another copy paste good morning message is distracting and annoying. I fully acknowledge I may be the odd one out here, as I find any repeated action like this quickly becomes either noise that gets ignored or creates a sense of obligation that breeds resentment. Even discord’s welcome emotes feel super fake and shallow. I’d rather people actually send human messages or not say anything. Old man rant over.
  - swatcoder 2y ago
    You're not alone. I think it depends on what group chat represents for you. For me, group chats are a way to coordinate with people and share with people. Token or ritual messages do neither of those things and feel like misuse to me. I'd find the GP's group chats to be noisy and obnoxious and I'd be gone in a minute. Connecting with people is something I do in other ways and by other mediums (and usually involve more mindful effort than token/ritual messages anyway).
cubefox 2y ago
I remember a poll on Facebook where someone asked whether you tend to appreciate or are annoyed by being invited into group chats. Most people appreciated invitations.
- gleenn 2y ago
  In general I loathe them. I feel like they are so distracting. And then people get all spammy in groups intended to be planning groups and you have to scroll back a year to find which hotel room to book or whatever. I have Messenger notifications blocked and honestly don't know how anyone pays attention to so many and also have day jobs.
  - cubefox 2y ago
    But what if you are invited into a rather exclusive group chat?
msie 2y ago
Reading this as my iMessage group chat has gone haywire. I'm missing messages or rather those messages are delayed by 1-2 days. Causing chaos as I am asking people to repeat or clarify their messages. Then I get non-sensical messages out of nowhere in the middle of the night because the context is missing.
the_snooze 2y ago
>Salons and groups have always existed but why the recent shift to private discourse? Because the public internet makes it too easy for people to sell you stuff, extract value from you, or harass you. Private chats are human-scale environments where understandable social norms---not commerce, algorithms, or formal rules---drive the interactions. It's an authentic experience.
- pavel_lishin 2y ago
  It's also a place where people can't easily take what you say out of context to make you look particularly bad. A safe space, in a way.
  - a1o 2y ago
    If the group is slightly bigger, like 20 or more, enough to have people you don't know away from keyboard, then this still can happen.
- lukan 2y ago
  If the groups get big enough, bots sneak in. Telegram is good for groups. But the bots are annoying even without LLMs. If the APIs get cheap and the bot makers smart, they can soon sneak in product placement in semi private chats (sport club, etc) where not everyone knows everyone. Right now the ads are quite obvious ads and scam, still many fall for it. So I suspect more invite only groups .. and that works, until the wrong person gets admin rights and their device owned. Not that hard to automate with that many outdated android phones out there.
  - the_snooze 2y ago
    I think I take a stricter definition of "private groups" than simply being "invite-only." Invites are a necessary condition, but not sufficient. To me, private groups are limited to people who already have an established connection offline, or otherwise might just be separated by one mutual connection. You need to actually know someone in the group to join, and required shared social understanding greatly reduces the risk of shenanigans otherwise common in the public internet.
jvm___ 2y ago
https://maggieappleton.com/ai-dark-forest https://maggieappleton.com/ai-dark-forest As AI takes over the public internet (the trees) the people will retreat to safe underground spaces where they know only authentic humans live.
- thegrim33 2y ago
  It's pretty ironic that every one of their "cozy internet" site examples requires pumping all of your communications through a third-party private business that only exists if it somehow can make money off of you, and which can do whatever nebulous stuff with your data that it wants. Doesn't seem very cozy to me. I believe the mainstream internet is already completely overrun by malicious actors, whether bots or not, and the majority of the population doesn't seem to care or have the ability to notice. I don't see the bulk of the population doing anything to retreat from it. A subset of the population, that includes myself, sure, but "the people", I doubt it.
  - groby_b 2y ago
    Sure, if you want to take a purist stance, we should start by inventing a universe free of third parties, to borrow from Feynman. Meanwhile, the goal of most of these private groups isn't to stick it to the man, or make sure all data is eternally private, but just to talk to each other in a non-public setting. It's OK to use a tool for that you haven't entirely built from scratch. Most humans, your "the people" (really? in quotes? did you want to write sheeple?), care more about getting on with their life than absolutist stances. They notice just fine, and they adjust as much as they feel the need to adjust.
  - theamk 2y ago
    I don't understand why some people hate third-party private businesses so much on the internet. I mean, people often have conversations in coffee shops, such as Starbucks. Starbucks is a third-party private business that only exists if it somehow can make money off of you. I am pretty sure it also does "nebulous stuff" with the data it gets off me - it has my credit card after all, and I am sure it runs all the analytics it can. It will remove me from the stores if they don't like me (with the exception of few law-protected cases). And yet, no one says that the physical world is "already completely overrun by malicious actors", and that somehow "majority of population" does not have the ability to notice that most of the establishments we interact with daily want to make money off me.
slowhadoken 2y ago
Group chat has been perfected for the last 15 years. Your uncle just hopped on in the last 4 years.
bnegreve 2y ago
> every group chat has a n-1 group containing everyone except that annoying member. And if you think your chat doesn’t have such a group, oh boy, do I have some bad news for you. There are more like 2^n - 1 subgroups, i.e. as many subgroups as the there can be. If you think you're safe because you're already part of one subgroup that complain about the people not included in this particular subgroup, I also have some bad news for you.
- lanstin 2y ago
  You are safe anyways by the "sticks and stones" principal. Worrying about what other people think about you, unless they are your immediate family, is a pretty inefficient use of time.
  - dingnuts 2y ago
    this is great advice for people who want to have no friends. You should care about what the people you respect think about you, because they are people you hold in high regard. They matter. The key is to dismiss the opinions of people who suck > unless they are your immediate family this is a terrible exception. Sometimes your immediate family sucks and you shouldn't care what they think of you (imagine that you're gay and they're all homophobes) as with most things, there's a balance to be struck. Sometimes you should care what other people think of you, if you don't want to be bitter and alone. Other times it's better to let the haters hate.
    - OJFord 2y ago
      Caring more about what your immediate family thinks doesn't mean you change your sexual preference to suit them - in fact it's exactly why it would be upsetting that they were 'all homophobes' in that scenario, more so than the fact that there do exist substantially more than [size of immediate family] homophobic people in the world for most, I imagine.
    - lanstin 2y ago
      1. My immediate family I meant spouse and children, not parents and siblings. Your point about family of origin is quite important. 2. I'm pretty old. My point is you can't really ever know how other people see you. It's what makes telepathy such an appealing/terrifying idea. You can be very responsive to your friends emotional states and the effect you have on them without ever really knowing how they see you. You might convince yourself you understand when you are young, but as you live longer, you have more situations where you are kind and affectionate to people that you see having a lot of flaws. My friends aren't really judging me, we just have a mutually enjoyable relationship. They know my flaws quite well, but like me anyways. Tying your friendships to some theories you have about how other people think about you is probably a pretty good way to avoid friendships, especially if you are aiming for some certain standard and avoid or hide yourself when you miss the mark. It's like the old canard about getting a special friend - when you don't need another person, you become more attractive to other people.
noobermin 2y ago
I have learned to avoid group chats. I don't mind actual in person groups, but either group chats I've been in have a serious veneer of in-authenticity or just sheer group think. I know this isolates me from a lot of people especially today who prefer meeting on discord but that's okay, it isn't for me. Chat works for a lot of things but I've never found it to be that great for socialising. Again, I suppose this is atypical now, but I always prefer in person meetings or phone calls and probably always will. Voice chat is probably better but since that usually precludes being part of a text chat in the first place, I haven't had a chance to try.
- the_snooze 2y ago
  >The best ones are a “forever dinner party” – good friends and conversation happening in perpetuity. I took the piece as mainly talking about group chats among people who already mostly know each other offline. From my experience, these are indeed really good, because the high barrier to entry keeps weird randos out and establishes a high floor for common interests and understanding. They're an online extension of in-person groups, not a substitute for them.
- distances 2y ago
  I agree, I really don't like chatty group chats. In-person meetings are great as you have very high engagement for a defined time, whereas a group chat has low engagement on a constant burn. Which I find super consuming. My preferred use of group chats (and 1-to-1 chats too!) is mainly just to arrange live meetings / calls. If a discussion gets going in the chat itself, I'll just have to silence the whole chat for a day or a week and read the messages later in one sitting.
- pavel_lishin 2y ago
  > Chat works for a lot of things but I've never found it to be that great for socialising. I think it works for some, but not others. I get something like 80% of my socializin' done via my various group chats - but I'm very heavily introverted. (And for what it's worth, I would absolutely loathe voice chats.()
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
sunbum 2y ago
> the great culture wars of 2020. Well that's the dumbest thing I have ever heard.
- standardUser 2y ago
  Queer people and women see and feel a culture war even if others do not.
  - immibis 2y ago
    To clarify: as the victims.
haolez 2y ago
I had an interesting experience with a WhatsApp group recently. In the past, WhatsApp groups had an upper limit of 256 participants. They then increased this to something much bigger (not sure how much, but at least 1,000). Anyway, I was a CTO and was a member of a group chat for CTOs. We had very insightful and rich discussions about topics that affected our roles, like vendor reputation, frameworks, team management, talent acquisition and so on. The group became popular and the admin started creating several groups to accommodate more participants. It looked something like "CTOs 1", "CTOs 2", etc When WhatsApp increased the upper limit, the admin merged all group chats into a single one of thousands of users. There was an effort to use the "Communities" feature to create topic-oriented subgroups, but that's beside the point. What ended up happening was that the discussions plummeted in quality, where a very noisy minority would take up most of the space in the discussions. There were some high profile CTOs that stopped engaging at that point. Also, the group chat was quickly infested with people trying to sell stuff (cloud services, HR services, etc) and the group became a mess. This left me wondering if there is enough demand for smaller social networks with very limited visibility that can foster rich and insightful discussions (although this sounds like forums from the nineties). And if it's possible to keep the sales people away, or at least invite-only.
- ibaikov 2y ago
  I had similar experience on Telegram where groups that grew in size plummeted in quality. I just came up with the following concept reading your comment: a slowmode, so that people can write once every x minutes, but others who are mostly read-only can give 'points' to those writing messages in the moment to bypass slowmode, basically they are voting for quality discussions to continue.
  - haolez 2y ago
    This would need to be dynamic, since a delay that works for a group of 1,000 would probably clutter a group of 100,000. And if all users post at the exact same time, slow mode doesn't help. But maybe there's value in solving this problem :) Interesting idea!
cglong 2y ago
Inertia with group chats is surprisingly strong. Following some iOS bug that was causing an MMS group chat to break down, I ran a poll to figure out which platform to move the conversation to. Even though Discord won, no one was using it. Turns out that the iOS users had instead spun up an iMessage chat and were just using that :( And yes, iMessage was an option in the poll (it came in fourth out of six).
w10-1 2y ago
Nice observations. In my experience, the most important aspect is whether people care about other people's take. At a minimum, care enough to maintain a respected persona, but mainly, to be interested in hearing and adopting or shaping others' approaches. It's the collective production of a refined collective understanding. If the motivation instead is malice or one-upsmanship or networking or shaping product reputations, the dynamic is less interesting. As a corollary, I wonder if the governance aspect - of controlling club entry, exit, and discourse standards - has to be animated by the same incentives. My main application for AI would be analyzing/evaluating discourse to automate or facilitate governance. If it could work regardless of incentives, then there's be less need for exclusivity, and discourse would scale much better.
welder 2y ago
I've been building a product to bring my Slack conversations to a new social platform [0] but I haven't figured out how to get the same meaningful and deep conversations about tech that happen in private chats. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tVTc9ibiSkM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tVTc9ibiSkM
baq 2y ago
> Salons and groups have always existed but why the recent shift to private discourse? ...what? There is nothing recent about this and there hasn't been any shift. I've had a private chat with the same people on different platforms for more than 20 years now. Then there have been facebook closed groups and the iMessage blue/green segregation fiasco and many, many more. > Which leads to the question: what makes one of these work? High SNR, shared social norms.
schmichael 2y ago
I'd like to say it was the 2016 elections, 2020 pandemic, and 2022 Musk acquisition that killed Twitter for me, but the truth is exactly what this article points out: I replaced nearly all of my traditional public social media usage with group chats in that time period. Those events just made the transition much easier! I use Mastodon occasionally and Reddit only as a passive consumer. I miss virtual communities a bit; as a youth in rural Illinois they were extremely formative for me. I hope disconnected folks still find their virtual communities, public or private, but I think I'm just in a different phase of my life where de-emphasizing them comes naturally. It's hard for me to disentangle whether it's me or the Internet that's changed, but from the positive reaction here and in group chats to this article: I feel safe assuming I'm at least not alone.
vundercind 2y ago
Why the recent shift? 1) Everything being in public was the aberration. Purely a post-Facebook thing. 2) … and also it was never really true, dig past the surface for almost any interest and you’ll find private forums, private sections of forums, private chat groups, groups of people hanging out IRL and not posting notes online, et c. When has this not been the case?
aborsy 2y ago
How do you get invited in good groups? Like, if you don’t have a friend inside already.
- schmichael 2y ago
  That is their core problem! The good news is that anyone who knows 2 or more other people that share an interest can quickly and easily start a group chat. They're free and if no one ever posts again, nothing lost. I've started group chats around something as momentous and permanent as fatherhood and something as silly and ephemeral as the 2003 film Master and Commander.
miguelazo 2y ago
>The great culture wars of 2020 meant people, especially in tech, weren’t comfortable sharing their views in public lest they get various online mobs after them. I don’t think this was a primary motivation. Further, left out Enshittification of the platforms from the bulleted list. I agree that group texts have taken over a lot of functions that used to be served by social media, but this seems like an exceptionally weak and ideologically motivated) analysis.
fsmv 2y ago
Private chats solve the problem of anonymity allowing people to behave badly. In a chat you have reputation and you get kicked if you're an asshole.
- noprocrasted 2y ago
  It doesn't have to be specific to private group chats. The same model worked well on public forums. The only reason it doesn't work on mainstream social media is that "assholes" not only still "engage" with the product (and watch ads) but they also cause other people to argue with them and "engage" more, so it's actually profitable to keep them around.
- celdon25 2y ago
  Also has the side effect of incentivizing groupthink, of which the harm outweighs the hypothetical cases where someone’s feelings might get hurt over an opinion
chrsw 2y ago
Feels like high school all over again where I wasn't allowed to sit at the "cool table".
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
fullstackchris 2y ago
> AI trends started in group chats what? the current LLM tech is a product of 50+ years of NLP and ML research... it didnt just pop out of group chats somewhere
- sangnoir 2y ago
  No, no, no - the trends are clear: it was obviously crypto first, then AI next, both brought to you by the same benevolent taste-making thought-leadership organized in elite private chat groups. /s
- meiraleal 2y ago
  25 years ago I started coding chatbots to manage a Dragon ball Z IRC channel. Many AI trends started in group chats, yes
fragmede 2y ago
> This leads to one of my favorite axioms: every group chat has a n-1 group containing everyone except that annoying member. And if you think your chat doesn’t have such a group, oh boy, do I have some bad news for you. This is directly at odds with the aforementioned moderation. The slack that I'm in has no qualms about warning toxic members of their shit, and making them ex-members if they have to. Thus the only N-1 groups are the positive kind - we're planning birthday things for the excluded member, not toxicly gossiping about them behind their back. It does take a more social aware and heavy handed moderation team, but this is a large group slack which has more features than one giant group chat. There are private channels there for specific invite-only groups, but they're still focused on a specific topic rather than excluding that one terrible person. The existence of an N-1 chat is a signal that the group can't do the hard thing and actually talk to that one person.
- Seattle3503 2y ago
  I disagree. I have chats where some people engage in good faith and aren't malicious, but nonetheless they are exhausting at times. You can tell them the rules and they will engage in good faith efforts to follow but the letter and spirit of the rules, but the simple truth is some people aren't "cool" or socially graced. One of my more social group chats has someone who is both autistic and extremely romantically lonely. He is, as the article describes, "the very online person who is familiar with participating in chat at all times". It is a net positive because anyone can get a response at any time, but they can be a bit much at times. You can either kick those people out, or take a break from them.
  - celdon25 2y ago
    The only sure way to avoid degenerate chat rooms is to stick with topics that are less appealing to degenerates. Trying to gatekeep your way out of those situations is a lost cause because now you’ve admitted that you aren’t there to build communities but rather to divide them for selfish reasons. Most of us figure that out by our mid 30s and I firmly believe that is a main reason you don’t usually see people over a certain age in that kind of environment. Some platforms like Discord or Reddit can have a network bias effect toward this as well.
jeffrallen 2y ago
If I was in any groups like this I'd mute them or leave. Even reading this guy's blog makes me exhausted. Introverts, unite! And then quietly look at their shoes awkwardly.
g9yuayon 2y ago
Speaking of group chats, I recalled an interesting story how MSN Messenger lost Chinese market. Back in 2003ish, MSN Messenger was THE shit in China. QQ, the competitor of MSN Messenger by Tencent, was losing ground rapidly, especially to white-collar users in big cities. To Microsoft, MSN Messenger probably was a toy, but to Tencent it was life and death. So QQ launched group chat. In addition, QQ Group Chat allowed users to drop any images, including GIFs into a chat. And man, that feature killed. Hundreds of millions of users got hooked. It was just so much fun to be creative and spread memes using this features. In the meantime, what was MSN Messenger's response? Absolutely nothing. No, it's worse than nothing. It was insulting. If I dropped a gif to a chat, MSN Messenger would always convert the gif into a 8x8 icon, and sometimes turned that gif into a static image. BTW, I'm not sure why, but big techs in the US somehow couldn't get Chinese market. Case in point, the emojis in all the chat apps, be it Apple's or Meta's or Google's or whatever, are just ugly and not expressive, when compared to WeChat's, let alone QQ's. Of course, as a Chinese user I'm biased, but that's the point: very few Chinese natives like the emojis offered by western countries (and I guess vice versa). And then, well, there's no "and then". The rest was history. MSN Messenger quickly became a niche and lost its user base. It made Chinese companies realized that they had a chance to out compete behemoths like Microsoft, by moving fast, by moving decisively, and by being creative to fit the psyche of Chinese market.
- mewse-hn 2y ago
  To be fair MSN Messenger went on to lose the western market as well
  - sureIy 2y ago
    I wonder whose fault that is exactly. Did it just get neglected or were PMs fighting against “technical limitations”? Sometimes supporting the new shiny feature means breaking the old one. If it’s not clear that the new one is a winner, some might hold onto the “better” (old) one and stale out. To me it’s insane how MSN Messenger and Skype got left out in the cold.
- thaumasiotes 2y ago
  > very few Chinese natives like the emojis offered by western countries (and I guess vice versa) As a Westerner, the Tencent smileys are mostly better. On QQ they animate, which I don't like, but on Wechat they're static and they provide much better options than the Western set. I don't think there's ever been a good "looking skeptical" smiley anywhere, though. For some reason, Tencent semi-recently redid all their smileys in a much uglier style. I wish that hadn't happened.
devanampiya 2y ago
Probably falling back to age old IRC might be an option. AI Might be implemented there as well in future, but not so quick, may be!
kva 2y ago
is there anything that VCs will _not_ pontificate on?
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
almazzz 2y ago
[dead]
pavel_lishin 2y ago
I wonder how Slack/Discord channels change this. In several of ones I'm in, we have a dedicated channel for topics that are best treaded lightly about - one is called "adult chat", another one is called "taboo". The understanding is that if you cannot participate in a civil manner, you leave the channel, for awhile. I've had to leave those channels on occasion. The chat, and I, were better for it. It also helps keeps discussions going, because I know that if I just want to vent, I can head over to #vent. If I need some tech support, I can go to the tech channel. If I want to shitpost, boy oh boy, have we got a channel for that!
qrian 2y ago
I have such fond memories of talking to interesting people in IRC back in the days. I recently felt an urge to feel such companionship and satisfy my intellectual curiousity with interesting conversation, but found that freenode and libera is mostly dead. Perhaps the success of discord contributed to its demise.
ehPReth 2y ago
must be nice.. :(
seeknotfind 2y ago
It's so sad though. Chats are very ephemeral.
kranzky 2y ago
Tech heads are re-discovering what "community" actually means, after overusing and abusing the term for the last two decades when they actually meant to say "audience" or "network".
- kranzky 2y ago
  You know you're in a community when people help each other move house, for example.
  - kranzky 2y ago
    A good problem for tech to solve is this: How do you turn a bunch of random strangers into a community?
switch007 2y ago
Contractors (tradespeople) love WhatsApp group chats in the UK. Instant gossiping (...libel) and blacklisting if a customer doesn't worship the ground you walk on.
celdon25 2y ago
A better title for that article would be “gatekeepers rule the world”
gverrilla 2y ago
This reads like an elaborate invitation for Ethereum-guy to join author's group chat. And also Erik Torenberg, whoever that is.
sovietswag 2y ago
This is an interesting avenue to add to my search of “where the experts hang out”. I tried to reflect on it here: https://josh8.com/blog/mailing_lists.html https://josh8.com/blog/mailing_lists.html (As you can infer from the title, I decided that ‘mailing lists’ is one good answer). I also had a brief discussion about the subject with an older person I respect, and this is what he had to say: > Interesting post. I think you've hit on the central issue: where are the experts? > > Back in the day, USENET was kind of the hotspot for that kind of thing; these days, it's mostly cranks and luddites; a few folks are still around, but it's just not what it once was. > >The challenge is tapping into the current set of experts; the thing is, TUHS and COFF are great for talking to the older generation, but (and I think that Doug, Ken and Rob at least would admit this) they're mostly retired and have handed the torch off to the next batch. So where are THOSE people? > > I think that there is no central online presence for that group like there was for the previous generation with USENET. I mostly chat with them at conferences or idly on social media, but the real work is being done more or less independently. To the extent that folks are communicating about it, I think it's mostly point-to-point. :-(
koolala 2y ago
true

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oldpersonintx 2y ago

[dead]

pigscantfly 2y ago

This is a very real take on where memes 'start' nowadays in the valley.

rvrs 2y ago

Once again an SV investor congratulates themselves on figuring out something that any teenager could've told you

woah 2y ago
Is it wrong to write about something?
- zarathustreal 2y ago
  If you’re 10+ years late to discover it, best to leave that article in the drafts

pphysch 2y ago

See also "influencer cabals" that specifically manipulate social media platforms, usually organized in group chats on the same platform.

throwadobe 2y ago
at this point many are managed by agencies which can play that game on their own without even needing said influencers to knowingly and willingly collude
Adachi91 2y ago
This is prominent in all engagement circles. A few months ago I somehow stumbled into a sex workers chat and it was filled with "Need boosts" and "I mod X, Y, Z subreddit and can get you verified and submission accepted faster". Engagement systems are awful imo, they've always been able to be gamed via click farms but most places can filter through inorganic engagement from mobile click farms in a single region, the "cheap" ones at least.

deadbabe 2y ago

A friend of a friend of mine showed me a group chat she was in of billionaires and millionaires daughters. Wow.

irrational 2y ago
Please tell more. How was it different than a normal group chat?
- deadbabe 2y ago
  Aside from the usual luxury pics, planning trips and events, pics with celebrities, and high society gossip and boiling hot tea, these women are very sexual. Nearly all are married but of course that doesn’t stop them from having their men on the side. A lot of these men look like male models and the chat is littered with nude pics showing off how very well endowed they are. If you’re very good looking with good social status packing 9 inches or more you could have a chance.
  - fullstick 2y ago
    Why would I want a chance with them anyway?
  - elevatedastalt 2y ago
    > 9 inches or more Ah, we are talking of internet inches I guess? The vast vast vast majority of men don't have 9" inches or more.
    - kortilla 2y ago
      Yes, being rich affords you access to the right side of the bell curve
      - astrange 2y ago
        This is even worse phrasing than when people say "order of magnitude more" and mean "more", because it makes you think everything is normally distributed, but it isn't.

Muromec 2y ago

A secret society without its own special hats, hand guestures and e2e encrypted chat platform just doesn’t take itself seriously

clpm4j 2y ago

I used to be involved in several, highly active group chats. Over time these effectively became a concentrated form of social media, i.e. mostly a distraction and waste of time.

subpixel 2y ago
I'm on exactly one group chat. Hell that's enough!
brnt 2y ago
I remember I first installed WhatsApp back in, o, 2013? I had held off for a long time, but I had just moved abroad and beggers can't be choosers. I was added to a group chat within 24 hours, and in the following 24 hours I watched all the pointless chatter and I deleted WhatsApp. I'm on Signal now, and the number of groups are under control.

dudus 2y ago

I see all kinds of small communities related to programming languages, YouTube creator, frontend frameworks, ... These look fun but I never have time to engage one for long enough to feel like I belong there as a member of that community opposed to just a temporary visitor. I noticed that Discord is usually the platform of choice but I can see some using other platforms, the platform doesn't really matter much, and it's nice to know you can always drop by to ask questions. But for some reason when it's Discord I imagine it's only kids on the other side, for better or worse. "I love inside jokes. I hope to be a part of one someday" -- Michael Scott

denysvitali 2y ago

It could be cool to have an HN Telegram group

cubefox 2y ago
We are far too many: > members forever without decreasing quality. Over time, the group decays in quality and I often find groups with >100 members unsustainable. Though there could be a decently small group chat for sufficiently ancient users.
- all2 2y ago
  We could do cohorts by hashing user uds and bucketing.
  - cubefox 2y ago
    Good idea!
localfirst 2y ago
don't see it working out tbh what HN does really well is manage pseudonyms and its low friction of signing up invites bullies/marketers/trolls dang and mod teams have done a fantastic job should put out some sort of "community management science" its tough to build a community from scratch (gone are the days of registering a niche domain + phpBB). you can fake it to a certain degree.
sneak 2y ago
Telegram isn’t end to end encrypted and you should uninstall it from your device.
- denysvitali 2y ago
  Neither is HN, should I stop using it too? Btw, Telegram is E2E encrypted opt-in
  - 2y ago

kelseyfrog 2y ago

On shared rituals, the ones I like the most are 1. Good mornings. Where it's a norm to post "Good morning" or equivalent at the start of your day. It signals that you're continuing to participate and value the group. 2. @Welcomes. When a new member joins, they are @-ed with a welcome message by the users currently present. It helps expand the join->engage funnel. Some groups have a lot of people show up and then never participate. 3. Wednesday, My Dudes. Where the group plays participates in the same weekly ritual of wishing each other a happy Wednesday. See also: Today Is Friday In California. In my experience, it's easy to introduce these into a group simply by modeling them. After a week or two of consistent behavior, someone else, and then many others will join in. Obviously one has to read the room first and get a sense it's the right ritual for the group.

scrollaway 2y ago
> Good mornings. Where it's a norm to post "Good morning" or equivalent at the start of your day Those a certain age will remember UGT ("Universal Greeting Time") from IRC. It's always morning when you enter the channel, always evening when you leave.
adapt_and_laugh 2y ago
This might just be me, but I actually hate these things. They always feel forced and corny and seeing the notification in a channel and thinking it is something interesting only to have it be another copy paste good morning message is distracting and annoying. I fully acknowledge I may be the odd one out here, as I find any repeated action like this quickly becomes either noise that gets ignored or creates a sense of obligation that breeds resentment. Even discord’s welcome emotes feel super fake and shallow. I’d rather people actually send human messages or not say anything. Old man rant over.
- swatcoder 2y ago
  You're not alone. I think it depends on what group chat represents for you. For me, group chats are a way to coordinate with people and share with people. Token or ritual messages do neither of those things and feel like misuse to me. I'd find the GP's group chats to be noisy and obnoxious and I'd be gone in a minute. Connecting with people is something I do in other ways and by other mediums (and usually involve more mindful effort than token/ritual messages anyway).

cubefox 2y ago

I remember a poll on Facebook where someone asked whether you tend to appreciate or are annoyed by being invited into group chats. Most people appreciated invitations.

gleenn 2y ago
In general I loathe them. I feel like they are so distracting. And then people get all spammy in groups intended to be planning groups and you have to scroll back a year to find which hotel room to book or whatever. I have Messenger notifications blocked and honestly don't know how anyone pays attention to so many and also have day jobs.
- cubefox 2y ago
  But what if you are invited into a rather exclusive group chat?

msie 2y ago

Reading this as my iMessage group chat has gone haywire. I'm missing messages or rather those messages are delayed by 1-2 days. Causing chaos as I am asking people to repeat or clarify their messages. Then I get non-sensical messages out of nowhere in the middle of the night because the context is missing.

the_snooze 2y ago

>Salons and groups have always existed but why the recent shift to private discourse? Because the public internet makes it too easy for people to sell you stuff, extract value from you, or harass you. Private chats are human-scale environments where understandable social norms---not commerce, algorithms, or formal rules---drive the interactions. It's an authentic experience.

pavel_lishin 2y ago
It's also a place where people can't easily take what you say out of context to make you look particularly bad. A safe space, in a way.
- a1o 2y ago
  If the group is slightly bigger, like 20 or more, enough to have people you don't know away from keyboard, then this still can happen.
lukan 2y ago
If the groups get big enough, bots sneak in. Telegram is good for groups. But the bots are annoying even without LLMs. If the APIs get cheap and the bot makers smart, they can soon sneak in product placement in semi private chats (sport club, etc) where not everyone knows everyone. Right now the ads are quite obvious ads and scam, still many fall for it. So I suspect more invite only groups .. and that works, until the wrong person gets admin rights and their device owned. Not that hard to automate with that many outdated android phones out there.
- the_snooze 2y ago
  I think I take a stricter definition of "private groups" than simply being "invite-only." Invites are a necessary condition, but not sufficient. To me, private groups are limited to people who already have an established connection offline, or otherwise might just be separated by one mutual connection. You need to actually know someone in the group to join, and required shared social understanding greatly reduces the risk of shenanigans otherwise common in the public internet.

jvm___ 2y ago

https://maggieappleton.com/ai-dark-forest https://maggieappleton.com/ai-dark-forest As AI takes over the public internet (the trees) the people will retreat to safe underground spaces where they know only authentic humans live.

thegrim33 2y ago
It's pretty ironic that every one of their "cozy internet" site examples requires pumping all of your communications through a third-party private business that only exists if it somehow can make money off of you, and which can do whatever nebulous stuff with your data that it wants. Doesn't seem very cozy to me. I believe the mainstream internet is already completely overrun by malicious actors, whether bots or not, and the majority of the population doesn't seem to care or have the ability to notice. I don't see the bulk of the population doing anything to retreat from it. A subset of the population, that includes myself, sure, but "the people", I doubt it.
- groby_b 2y ago
  Sure, if you want to take a purist stance, we should start by inventing a universe free of third parties, to borrow from Feynman. Meanwhile, the goal of most of these private groups isn't to stick it to the man, or make sure all data is eternally private, but just to talk to each other in a non-public setting. It's OK to use a tool for that you haven't entirely built from scratch. Most humans, your "the people" (really? in quotes? did you want to write sheeple?), care more about getting on with their life than absolutist stances. They notice just fine, and they adjust as much as they feel the need to adjust.
- theamk 2y ago
  I don't understand why some people hate third-party private businesses so much on the internet. I mean, people often have conversations in coffee shops, such as Starbucks. Starbucks is a third-party private business that only exists if it somehow can make money off of you. I am pretty sure it also does "nebulous stuff" with the data it gets off me - it has my credit card after all, and I am sure it runs all the analytics it can. It will remove me from the stores if they don't like me (with the exception of few law-protected cases). And yet, no one says that the physical world is "already completely overrun by malicious actors", and that somehow "majority of population" does not have the ability to notice that most of the establishments we interact with daily want to make money off me.

slowhadoken 2y ago

Group chat has been perfected for the last 15 years. Your uncle just hopped on in the last 4 years.

bnegreve 2y ago

> every group chat has a n-1 group containing everyone except that annoying member. And if you think your chat doesn’t have such a group, oh boy, do I have some bad news for you. There are more like 2^n - 1 subgroups, i.e. as many subgroups as the there can be. If you think you're safe because you're already part of one subgroup that complain about the people not included in this particular subgroup, I also have some bad news for you.

lanstin 2y ago
You are safe anyways by the "sticks and stones" principal. Worrying about what other people think about you, unless they are your immediate family, is a pretty inefficient use of time.
- dingnuts 2y ago
  this is great advice for people who want to have no friends. You should care about what the people you respect think about you, because they are people you hold in high regard. They matter. The key is to dismiss the opinions of people who suck > unless they are your immediate family this is a terrible exception. Sometimes your immediate family sucks and you shouldn't care what they think of you (imagine that you're gay and they're all homophobes) as with most things, there's a balance to be struck. Sometimes you should care what other people think of you, if you don't want to be bitter and alone. Other times it's better to let the haters hate.
  - OJFord 2y ago
    Caring more about what your immediate family thinks doesn't mean you change your sexual preference to suit them - in fact it's exactly why it would be upsetting that they were 'all homophobes' in that scenario, more so than the fact that there do exist substantially more than [size of immediate family] homophobic people in the world for most, I imagine.
  - lanstin 2y ago
    1. My immediate family I meant spouse and children, not parents and siblings. Your point about family of origin is quite important. 2. I'm pretty old. My point is you can't really ever know how other people see you. It's what makes telepathy such an appealing/terrifying idea. You can be very responsive to your friends emotional states and the effect you have on them without ever really knowing how they see you. You might convince yourself you understand when you are young, but as you live longer, you have more situations where you are kind and affectionate to people that you see having a lot of flaws. My friends aren't really judging me, we just have a mutually enjoyable relationship. They know my flaws quite well, but like me anyways. Tying your friendships to some theories you have about how other people think about you is probably a pretty good way to avoid friendships, especially if you are aiming for some certain standard and avoid or hide yourself when you miss the mark. It's like the old canard about getting a special friend - when you don't need another person, you become more attractive to other people.

noobermin 2y ago

I have learned to avoid group chats. I don't mind actual in person groups, but either group chats I've been in have a serious veneer of in-authenticity or just sheer group think. I know this isolates me from a lot of people especially today who prefer meeting on discord but that's okay, it isn't for me. Chat works for a lot of things but I've never found it to be that great for socialising. Again, I suppose this is atypical now, but I always prefer in person meetings or phone calls and probably always will. Voice chat is probably better but since that usually precludes being part of a text chat in the first place, I haven't had a chance to try.

the_snooze 2y ago
>The best ones are a “forever dinner party” – good friends and conversation happening in perpetuity. I took the piece as mainly talking about group chats among people who already mostly know each other offline. From my experience, these are indeed really good, because the high barrier to entry keeps weird randos out and establishes a high floor for common interests and understanding. They're an online extension of in-person groups, not a substitute for them.
distances 2y ago
I agree, I really don't like chatty group chats. In-person meetings are great as you have very high engagement for a defined time, whereas a group chat has low engagement on a constant burn. Which I find super consuming. My preferred use of group chats (and 1-to-1 chats too!) is mainly just to arrange live meetings / calls. If a discussion gets going in the chat itself, I'll just have to silence the whole chat for a day or a week and read the messages later in one sitting.
pavel_lishin 2y ago
> Chat works for a lot of things but I've never found it to be that great for socialising. I think it works for some, but not others. I get something like 80% of my socializin' done via my various group chats - but I'm very heavily introverted. (And for what it's worth, I would absolutely loathe voice chats.()
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

sunbum 2y ago

> the great culture wars of 2020. Well that's the dumbest thing I have ever heard.

standardUser 2y ago
Queer people and women see and feel a culture war even if others do not.
- immibis 2y ago
  To clarify: as the victims.

haolez 2y ago

I had an interesting experience with a WhatsApp group recently. In the past, WhatsApp groups had an upper limit of 256 participants. They then increased this to something much bigger (not sure how much, but at least 1,000). Anyway, I was a CTO and was a member of a group chat for CTOs. We had very insightful and rich discussions about topics that affected our roles, like vendor reputation, frameworks, team management, talent acquisition and so on. The group became popular and the admin started creating several groups to accommodate more participants. It looked something like "CTOs 1", "CTOs 2", etc When WhatsApp increased the upper limit, the admin merged all group chats into a single one of thousands of users. There was an effort to use the "Communities" feature to create topic-oriented subgroups, but that's beside the point. What ended up happening was that the discussions plummeted in quality, where a very noisy minority would take up most of the space in the discussions. There were some high profile CTOs that stopped engaging at that point. Also, the group chat was quickly infested with people trying to sell stuff (cloud services, HR services, etc) and the group became a mess. This left me wondering if there is enough demand for smaller social networks with very limited visibility that can foster rich and insightful discussions (although this sounds like forums from the nineties). And if it's possible to keep the sales people away, or at least invite-only.

ibaikov 2y ago
I had similar experience on Telegram where groups that grew in size plummeted in quality. I just came up with the following concept reading your comment: a slowmode, so that people can write once every x minutes, but others who are mostly read-only can give 'points' to those writing messages in the moment to bypass slowmode, basically they are voting for quality discussions to continue.
- haolez 2y ago
  This would need to be dynamic, since a delay that works for a group of 1,000 would probably clutter a group of 100,000. And if all users post at the exact same time, slow mode doesn't help. But maybe there's value in solving this problem :) Interesting idea!

cglong 2y ago

Inertia with group chats is surprisingly strong. Following some iOS bug that was causing an MMS group chat to break down, I ran a poll to figure out which platform to move the conversation to. Even though Discord won, no one was using it. Turns out that the iOS users had instead spun up an iMessage chat and were just using that :( And yes, iMessage was an option in the poll (it came in fourth out of six).

w10-1 2y ago

Nice observations. In my experience, the most important aspect is whether people care about other people's take. At a minimum, care enough to maintain a respected persona, but mainly, to be interested in hearing and adopting or shaping others' approaches. It's the collective production of a refined collective understanding. If the motivation instead is malice or one-upsmanship or networking or shaping product reputations, the dynamic is less interesting. As a corollary, I wonder if the governance aspect - of controlling club entry, exit, and discourse standards - has to be animated by the same incentives. My main application for AI would be analyzing/evaluating discourse to automate or facilitate governance. If it could work regardless of incentives, then there's be less need for exclusivity, and discourse would scale much better.

welder 2y ago

I've been building a product to bring my Slack conversations to a new social platform [0] but I haven't figured out how to get the same meaningful and deep conversations about tech that happen in private chats. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tVTc9ibiSkM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tVTc9ibiSkM

baq 2y ago

> Salons and groups have always existed but why the recent shift to private discourse? ...what? There is nothing recent about this and there hasn't been any shift. I've had a private chat with the same people on different platforms for more than 20 years now. Then there have been facebook closed groups and the iMessage blue/green segregation fiasco and many, many more. > Which leads to the question: what makes one of these work? High SNR, shared social norms.

schmichael 2y ago

I'd like to say it was the 2016 elections, 2020 pandemic, and 2022 Musk acquisition that killed Twitter for me, but the truth is exactly what this article points out: I replaced nearly all of my traditional public social media usage with group chats in that time period. Those events just made the transition much easier! I use Mastodon occasionally and Reddit only as a passive consumer. I miss virtual communities a bit; as a youth in rural Illinois they were extremely formative for me. I hope disconnected folks still find their virtual communities, public or private, but I think I'm just in a different phase of my life where de-emphasizing them comes naturally. It's hard for me to disentangle whether it's me or the Internet that's changed, but from the positive reaction here and in group chats to this article: I feel safe assuming I'm at least not alone.

vundercind 2y ago

Why the recent shift? 1) Everything being in public was the aberration. Purely a post-Facebook thing. 2) … and also it was never really true, dig past the surface for almost any interest and you’ll find private forums, private sections of forums, private chat groups, groups of people hanging out IRL and not posting notes online, et c. When has this not been the case?

aborsy 2y ago

How do you get invited in good groups? Like, if you don’t have a friend inside already.

schmichael 2y ago
That is their core problem! The good news is that anyone who knows 2 or more other people that share an interest can quickly and easily start a group chat. They're free and if no one ever posts again, nothing lost. I've started group chats around something as momentous and permanent as fatherhood and something as silly and ephemeral as the 2003 film Master and Commander.

miguelazo 2y ago

>The great culture wars of 2020 meant people, especially in tech, weren’t comfortable sharing their views in public lest they get various online mobs after them. I don’t think this was a primary motivation. Further, left out Enshittification of the platforms from the bulleted list. I agree that group texts have taken over a lot of functions that used to be served by social media, but this seems like an exceptionally weak and ideologically motivated) analysis.

fsmv 2y ago

Private chats solve the problem of anonymity allowing people to behave badly. In a chat you have reputation and you get kicked if you're an asshole.

noprocrasted 2y ago
It doesn't have to be specific to private group chats. The same model worked well on public forums. The only reason it doesn't work on mainstream social media is that "assholes" not only still "engage" with the product (and watch ads) but they also cause other people to argue with them and "engage" more, so it's actually profitable to keep them around.
celdon25 2y ago
Also has the side effect of incentivizing groupthink, of which the harm outweighs the hypothetical cases where someone’s feelings might get hurt over an opinion

chrsw 2y ago

Feels like high school all over again where I wasn't allowed to sit at the "cool table".

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

fullstackchris 2y ago

> AI trends started in group chats what? the current LLM tech is a product of 50+ years of NLP and ML research... it didnt just pop out of group chats somewhere

sangnoir 2y ago
No, no, no - the trends are clear: it was obviously crypto first, then AI next, both brought to you by the same benevolent taste-making thought-leadership organized in elite private chat groups. /s
meiraleal 2y ago
25 years ago I started coding chatbots to manage a Dragon ball Z IRC channel. Many AI trends started in group chats, yes

fragmede 2y ago

> This leads to one of my favorite axioms: every group chat has a n-1 group containing everyone except that annoying member. And if you think your chat doesn’t have such a group, oh boy, do I have some bad news for you. This is directly at odds with the aforementioned moderation. The slack that I'm in has no qualms about warning toxic members of their shit, and making them ex-members if they have to. Thus the only N-1 groups are the positive kind - we're planning birthday things for the excluded member, not toxicly gossiping about them behind their back. It does take a more social aware and heavy handed moderation team, but this is a large group slack which has more features than one giant group chat. There are private channels there for specific invite-only groups, but they're still focused on a specific topic rather than excluding that one terrible person. The existence of an N-1 chat is a signal that the group can't do the hard thing and actually talk to that one person.

Seattle3503 2y ago
I disagree. I have chats where some people engage in good faith and aren't malicious, but nonetheless they are exhausting at times. You can tell them the rules and they will engage in good faith efforts to follow but the letter and spirit of the rules, but the simple truth is some people aren't "cool" or socially graced. One of my more social group chats has someone who is both autistic and extremely romantically lonely. He is, as the article describes, "the very online person who is familiar with participating in chat at all times". It is a net positive because anyone can get a response at any time, but they can be a bit much at times. You can either kick those people out, or take a break from them.
- celdon25 2y ago
  The only sure way to avoid degenerate chat rooms is to stick with topics that are less appealing to degenerates. Trying to gatekeep your way out of those situations is a lost cause because now you’ve admitted that you aren’t there to build communities but rather to divide them for selfish reasons. Most of us figure that out by our mid 30s and I firmly believe that is a main reason you don’t usually see people over a certain age in that kind of environment. Some platforms like Discord or Reddit can have a network bias effect toward this as well.

jeffrallen 2y ago

If I was in any groups like this I'd mute them or leave. Even reading this guy's blog makes me exhausted. Introverts, unite! And then quietly look at their shoes awkwardly.

g9yuayon 2y ago

Speaking of group chats, I recalled an interesting story how MSN Messenger lost Chinese market. Back in 2003ish, MSN Messenger was THE shit in China. QQ, the competitor of MSN Messenger by Tencent, was losing ground rapidly, especially to white-collar users in big cities. To Microsoft, MSN Messenger probably was a toy, but to Tencent it was life and death. So QQ launched group chat. In addition, QQ Group Chat allowed users to drop any images, including GIFs into a chat. And man, that feature killed. Hundreds of millions of users got hooked. It was just so much fun to be creative and spread memes using this features. In the meantime, what was MSN Messenger's response? Absolutely nothing. No, it's worse than nothing. It was insulting. If I dropped a gif to a chat, MSN Messenger would always convert the gif into a 8x8 icon, and sometimes turned that gif into a static image. BTW, I'm not sure why, but big techs in the US somehow couldn't get Chinese market. Case in point, the emojis in all the chat apps, be it Apple's or Meta's or Google's or whatever, are just ugly and not expressive, when compared to WeChat's, let alone QQ's. Of course, as a Chinese user I'm biased, but that's the point: very few Chinese natives like the emojis offered by western countries (and I guess vice versa). And then, well, there's no "and then". The rest was history. MSN Messenger quickly became a niche and lost its user base. It made Chinese companies realized that they had a chance to out compete behemoths like Microsoft, by moving fast, by moving decisively, and by being creative to fit the psyche of Chinese market.

mewse-hn 2y ago
To be fair MSN Messenger went on to lose the western market as well
- sureIy 2y ago
  I wonder whose fault that is exactly. Did it just get neglected or were PMs fighting against “technical limitations”? Sometimes supporting the new shiny feature means breaking the old one. If it’s not clear that the new one is a winner, some might hold onto the “better” (old) one and stale out. To me it’s insane how MSN Messenger and Skype got left out in the cold.
thaumasiotes 2y ago
> very few Chinese natives like the emojis offered by western countries (and I guess vice versa) As a Westerner, the Tencent smileys are mostly better. On QQ they animate, which I don't like, but on Wechat they're static and they provide much better options than the Western set. I don't think there's ever been a good "looking skeptical" smiley anywhere, though. For some reason, Tencent semi-recently redid all their smileys in a much uglier style. I wish that hadn't happened.

devanampiya 2y ago

Probably falling back to age old IRC might be an option. AI Might be implemented there as well in future, but not so quick, may be!

kva 2y ago

is there anything that VCs will _not_ pontificate on?

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

almazzz 2y ago

[dead]

pavel_lishin 2y ago

I wonder how Slack/Discord channels change this. In several of ones I'm in, we have a dedicated channel for topics that are best treaded lightly about - one is called "adult chat", another one is called "taboo". The understanding is that if you cannot participate in a civil manner, you leave the channel, for awhile. I've had to leave those channels on occasion. The chat, and I, were better for it. It also helps keeps discussions going, because I know that if I just want to vent, I can head over to #vent. If I need some tech support, I can go to the tech channel. If I want to shitpost, boy oh boy, have we got a channel for that!

qrian 2y ago

I have such fond memories of talking to interesting people in IRC back in the days. I recently felt an urge to feel such companionship and satisfy my intellectual curiousity with interesting conversation, but found that freenode and libera is mostly dead. Perhaps the success of discord contributed to its demise.

ehPReth 2y ago

must be nice.. :(

seeknotfind 2y ago

It's so sad though. Chats are very ephemeral.

kranzky 2y ago

Tech heads are re-discovering what "community" actually means, after overusing and abusing the term for the last two decades when they actually meant to say "audience" or "network".

kranzky 2y ago
You know you're in a community when people help each other move house, for example.
- kranzky 2y ago
  A good problem for tech to solve is this: How do you turn a bunch of random strangers into a community?

switch007 2y ago

Contractors (tradespeople) love WhatsApp group chats in the UK. Instant gossiping (...libel) and blacklisting if a customer doesn't worship the ground you walk on.

celdon25 2y ago

A better title for that article would be “gatekeepers rule the world”

gverrilla 2y ago

This reads like an elaborate invitation for Ethereum-guy to join author's group chat. And also Erik Torenberg, whoever that is.

sovietswag 2y ago

This is an interesting avenue to add to my search of “where the experts hang out”. I tried to reflect on it here: https://josh8.com/blog/mailing_lists.html https://josh8.com/blog/mailing_lists.html (As you can infer from the title, I decided that ‘mailing lists’ is one good answer). I also had a brief discussion about the subject with an older person I respect, and this is what he had to say: > Interesting post. I think you've hit on the central issue: where are the experts? > > Back in the day, USENET was kind of the hotspot for that kind of thing; these days, it's mostly cranks and luddites; a few folks are still around, but it's just not what it once was. > >The challenge is tapping into the current set of experts; the thing is, TUHS and COFF are great for talking to the older generation, but (and I think that Doug, Ken and Rob at least would admit this) they're mostly retired and have handed the torch off to the next batch. So where are THOSE people? > > I think that there is no central online presence for that group like there was for the previous generation with USENET. I mostly chat with them at conferences or idly on social media, but the real work is being done more or less independently. To the extent that folks are communicating about it, I think it's mostly point-to-point. :-(

koolala 2y ago

true