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>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 stuf

>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 Not that hard to automate with that many outdated android phones out there.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.
  - lovethevoid 2y ago
    Would agree with this. I have witnessed a smaller private group have stuff leaked and scraped, which was interesting yet petty drama but the more important angle that relates to what you’re talking about is that bad faith actor was removed and now fewer people get full access. I think that’s the way most groups are going to lean, “quarantined” initial access that opens up after whatever metrics they deem important. Of course you can’t prevent all bad things from ever happening, but it’s enough to deter mindless web content scraping bots and such!
  - andersa 2y ago
    Doesn't make sense to require anything offline in the modern world. I'd argue the vast majority of group chats consists of people who have never met, likely live on entirely different continents, and yet have something in common (like they all played the same game together, or work in the same industry, or something like that) and roughly similar values.
    - bigiain 2y ago
      There's not a single person in any of my Signal group chats that I haven't eaten, drank, and/or danced with. I very much require "offline connections" with people in my group chats. In my head, what you're describing is "social media groups". I have not met most of the people I follow on Mastodon in real life. There is some crossover between my Mastodon crowd and my Signal group chat crowd, but it's fairly small. I also have a few Slack "workspaces" that are mostly "something in common" groups of largely "not friends, just other people". I am a member of a few web forums which each have a core of people who are becoming or have become real life friends, but include a vast majority of people who are not and will never be friends. Everybody in my Signal group chats is a friend or at the very least a friend of a friend. In general Madtodon interactions are with "other people", not "friends". (But I totally get that other people do online and real fife relationships differently to me.
      - wincy 2y ago
        As an example of a group I’ve recently become a part of, I go to a sizable convention once a year. I met some people there and we traded Discord usernames. They invited me to their private group and we’ve coordinated events, and there are four other people that I’ve yet to meet in this group, and one is rooming with me at the convention. So I guess in this case our communications are “we’re soon to be real life friends”. Also a coworker who lives in a different country who hasn’t gotten to meet us is in my group chats for my gaming group. We’d be in real life friends if the opportunity presents itself (maybe at a conference or something) but we’ve never met physically. That said 90% of people in my group chats are people I’ve met in person, just trying to justify a few exceptions I personally have.
fragmede 2y ago
on any public forum you're at the mercy of the whims of moderators, usually unpaid, which can be capricious, or absent, eventually leading to unproductive circular flamewars every time theres a new article on, say, Israel. Having the same arguments and going in circles when there's no new real information is just tiresome for everyone else involved (and some people get really emotionally invested). private group chat, you can tell those people to knock it off, or they're out of the group or slack/discord/zulip.
1vuio0pswjnm7 2y ago
Please note: This submission is a blog post from Silicon Valley VC at Andreesen Horowitz about where some of the bad ideas on the internet come from. According to this blogger, they come from SillyCon Valley VC group chats. It is not a blog post about a shift to private discourse. If the blog post is true, these VC are likely using group chats to come up with ideas of how to "sell you stuff" and "extract value from you". The chats may be subject to social norms, but _commerce_ is 100% driving the discussion. Please don't misunderstand me. I am a long-time supporter of peer-to-peer networking amongst small networks of friends and family. But according to the blog post, the VC using group chats are interested in something else: using the internet to spread bad ideas. Further, today's chat apps are generally controlled by companies found in the portfolios of these VC.
Barrin92 2y ago
> It's an authentic experience. In many cases its the exact opposite, it's authenticity sold to you as an experience, and thus Clubhouse was born. Exclusivity as a service, about as authentic as Westworld. Which was obviously true for a lot of historical clubs as well, they're often just commercial spaces where you get to feel exclusive and that is most of the draw. It's no accident that so many of these new private online communities are crypto, AI tech or VC centric and were born coincidentally enough when a lot of money poured into them. If you want to see real interesting things in tech watch Andrej Karpathy rebuild GPT-2 from scratch on Youtube, everyone can follow along. That's authentic technology and science, it's all open these days.

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.
- lovethevoid 2y ago
  Would agree with this. I have witnessed a smaller private group have stuff leaked and scraped, which was interesting yet petty drama but the more important angle that relates to what you’re talking about is that bad faith actor was removed and now fewer people get full access. I think that’s the way most groups are going to lean, “quarantined” initial access that opens up after whatever metrics they deem important. Of course you can’t prevent all bad things from ever happening, but it’s enough to deter mindless web content scraping bots and such!
- andersa 2y ago
  Doesn't make sense to require anything offline in the modern world. I'd argue the vast majority of group chats consists of people who have never met, likely live on entirely different continents, and yet have something in common (like they all played the same game together, or work in the same industry, or something like that) and roughly similar values.
  - bigiain 2y ago
    There's not a single person in any of my Signal group chats that I haven't eaten, drank, and/or danced with. I very much require "offline connections" with people in my group chats. In my head, what you're describing is "social media groups". I have not met most of the people I follow on Mastodon in real life. There is some crossover between my Mastodon crowd and my Signal group chat crowd, but it's fairly small. I also have a few Slack "workspaces" that are mostly "something in common" groups of largely "not friends, just other people". I am a member of a few web forums which each have a core of people who are becoming or have become real life friends, but include a vast majority of people who are not and will never be friends. Everybody in my Signal group chats is a friend or at the very least a friend of a friend. In general Madtodon interactions are with "other people", not "friends". (But I totally get that other people do online and real fife relationships differently to me.
    - wincy 2y ago
      As an example of a group I’ve recently become a part of, I go to a sizable convention once a year. I met some people there and we traded Discord usernames. They invited me to their private group and we’ve coordinated events, and there are four other people that I’ve yet to meet in this group, and one is rooming with me at the convention. So I guess in this case our communications are “we’re soon to be real life friends”. Also a coworker who lives in a different country who hasn’t gotten to meet us is in my group chats for my gaming group. We’d be in real life friends if the opportunity presents itself (maybe at a conference or something) but we’ve never met physically. That said 90% of people in my group chats are people I’ve met in person, just trying to justify a few exceptions I personally have.

fragmede 2y ago

on any public forum you're at the mercy of the whims of moderators, usually unpaid, which can be capricious, or absent, eventually leading to unproductive circular flamewars every time theres a new article on, say, Israel. Having the same arguments and going in circles when there's no new real information is just tiresome for everyone else involved (and some people get really emotionally invested). private group chat, you can tell those people to knock it off, or they're out of the group or slack/discord/zulip.

1vuio0pswjnm7 2y ago

Please note: This submission is a blog post from Silicon Valley VC at Andreesen Horowitz about where some of the bad ideas on the internet come from. According to this blogger, they come from SillyCon Valley VC group chats. It is not a blog post about a shift to private discourse. If the blog post is true, these VC are likely using group chats to come up with ideas of how to "sell you stuff" and "extract value from you". The chats may be subject to social norms, but _commerce_ is 100% driving the discussion. Please don't misunderstand me. I am a long-time supporter of peer-to-peer networking amongst small networks of friends and family. But according to the blog post, the VC using group chats are interested in something else: using the internet to spread bad ideas. Further, today's chat apps are generally controlled by companies found in the portfolios of these VC.

Barrin92 2y ago

> It's an authentic experience. In many cases its the exact opposite, it's authenticity sold to you as an experience, and thus Clubhouse was born. Exclusivity as a service, about as authentic as Westworld. Which was obviously true for a lot of historical clubs as well, they're often just commercial spaces where you get to feel exclusive and that is most of the draw. It's no accident that so many of these new private online communities are crypto, AI tech or VC centric and were born coincidentally enough when a lot of money poured into them. If you want to see real interesting things in tech watch Andrej Karpathy rebuild GPT-2 from scratch on Youtube, everyone can follow along. That's authentic technology and science, it's all open these days.