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I’ve noticed my kid (12) primarily uses group chats over social apps. Some of his chats have several dozen kids in them. It could be social media got so bad tha

I’ve noticed my kid (12) primarily uses group chats over social apps. Some of his chats have several dozen kids in them. It could be social media got so bad that the protocols became the best alternative. An old programmer like me sees a glimmer of hope in a sea of noise.

bognition 1y ago
Group chat has always been the killer social app. 6 years ago I convinced my browser friends group to adopt Telegram and since then we’ve all abandoned FB, Instagram, etc… We have a ton of different threads all with different topics: kids, food, gardening, exercise, pets, memes, and a bunch of serious topic threads as well. It’s been incredibly effective at keeping us connected and engaged as we’ve all moved across the country and grow in an apart physically. The take away is; what people want from social media is to be connected with their real friends. However that isn’t as engaging as a random feed, so the companies push people away from that.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- foobarian 1y ago
  I'm in a similar group but using Discord. It seems that lack of advertising or any kind of algo feed is the common feature. Who runs your Telegram server?
  - robrtsql 1y ago
    Do you mean 'run' as in run the community in some sort of administration sense? Telegram cannot be self-hosted (unless I am misinformed..).
    - balamatom 1y ago
      Neither can Discord; its usage of "server" in particular is a weaponized misappropriation.
      - Aeolun 1y ago
        I mean, their internal terminology is still guild. I’m not sure they intended to call it server until their userbase did?
        balamatom 1y ago
        Muddling the meaning of the term "server" either way.
  - balamatom 1y ago
    >Who runs your Telegram server? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Security_Service https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Security_Service
- pookha 1y ago
  I hate group chats (hate). It's a cliquey childish high-school cafeteria mode of communicating (thus why highschoolers use group chats). It's a clear step backwards and is representative of the covid-era stazi-like mentality people developed where they felt it was unsanity to share their views or life with the world at large (and maybe, given what we've learned about social media and nation-states, that's not without merit -- i.e the UK). Perfect world social media is a means of forming connections and expanding your little room(s).
  - lukan 1y ago
    "Perfect world social media is a means of forming connections" What stops people from being part of X group chats? All a connection on their own?
  - simonask 1y ago
    Is it - hear me out - possible that you are overthinking this? People tend to use group chats for coordination and quick banter with people they already know. Not as an alternative to the phpBB boards of old.
    - photonthug 1y ago
      Eh, I think the parent has a point. You underline it yourself when you say “people they already know”. The internet didn’t always involve a choice between “talk to people I know” vs “bravely/foolishly taking on the vitriol of a wild horde of angry delusional maniacs”, but now we’ve lost almost all of the space in between those extremes. People like hacker news exactly because it’s the rare place that’s still in the middle *(sometimes, on some topics, for now)
      - Aeolun 1y ago
        There’s a lot of people on hackernews with whom I cannot agree on a great many important things. Happily, none of them appear to be technical, so it works out fine.
    - balamatom 1y ago
- wintermutestwin 1y ago
  I guess group chat would be fine if all your friends are friends of each other. High School and college ages maybe, but as an older adult, I have so many different groups of people that I interact with that it would be obnoxious to deal with. I also find that there are certain people in group chats who are lonely and spam crap.
  - sbarre 1y ago
    You can have many group chats though? I do that in Signal, I have group chats with different circles of friends ,and we also regularly create short-lived purpose-built chats for events or other things... It's a bit more friction perhaps but in the end it works well and we've been doing it for years.
nottorp 1y ago
Even facebook basically started as a group chat. Back when we all had pet dinosaurs in our back yards and you only saw what your friends post. This is a useful function as opposed to what the engagement algorithms push these days. So no wonder everyone moves to other options for group communication. You mean you don't have a "where do we go out this saturday" chat group with your friends circle?
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
jjani 1y ago
I never understood why they became less popular when mobile phones took over. Even in the 00s so many people were already in group chats through MSN, ICQ and so on. All Microsoft had to do was make the former into a proper mobile app. Instead they wasted billions on Skype to replace their golden opportunity.
- burkaman 1y ago
  Did they become less popular? I think they are just less visible by nature, they've always been pretty common. I guess some people switched to Facebook Groups for a time, but even that is sort of a form of group chat.
- foobarian 1y ago
  They never worked properly on phones, including images/video and history. Same for SMS chats on top of being hideously expensive because the phone companies thought it was still the 1960s.
  - iforgotpassword 1y ago
    Yes, that's why they should have made them work properly. Simply put the main problem was that those old IMs required a persistent connection to the server when you "just" had to add a new protocol that can do session resumption/polling. Then make a pretty mobile UI and make it possible to find other users by phone number - imo this was the number one reason why WhatsApp and iMessage won. It's an app on your phone, so it uses your phone number, not another artificial number or name or mail address - it's something the most tech illiterate gets. Because then it's just "SMS but with groups and photos". But you could have allowed to merge it with your existing account from desktop times, so all the young hip people would've kept all their contacts.
    - bentcorner 1y ago
      IIRC one of the reasons WhatsApp has done so well is that they basically supported every platform under the sun, which was a technical challenge back in the day. These days the field is much narrower but 10+ years ago finding an app that supported everyone's device was a challenge.
hylaride 1y ago
It's been that way for awhile, though they do use instagram and/or tiktok for consumption. iMessage is (was?) a very sticky product for Apple as kids with android get cut out of chats. There's nothing worse for teens that exclusion. The kids have been taught the dangers of sharing things on the internet, so the risk is minimized sharing in private chats (though obviously still there).
- FireBeyond 1y ago
  > iMessage is (was?) a very sticky product for Apple as kids with android get cut out of chats. There's nothing worse for teens that exclusion. Craig Federighi fought against supporting iMessage on Android and RCS for a long time saying, quote, "It would remove obstacles towards iPhone families being able to give their kids Android phones."
- handfuloflight 1y ago
  > iMessage is (was?) a very sticky product for Apple as kids with android get cut out of chats. There's nothing worse for teens that exclusion. Are kids really that simplistically divided?
  - dcchambers 1y ago
    100%. iMessage is THE number one thing selling iphones these days, and has been for a long time.
    - handfuloflight 1y ago
      But why does it matter if the majority of cellular plans provide unlimited texting?
      - tmpz22 1y ago
        Its about the extra features iMessage has because of Apple's superset of the underlying SMS/MMS functionality. Its also about having a blue bubble (not-poor) versus a green bubble (poor). It defies belief how much some demographics care about this stuff, I didn't believe it when I first heard either. Some of it is improving with RCS but its got a ways to go.
morkalork 1y ago
Group chats are: free, have no ads, and sharing is with exactly who you intend. When I want to send a photo to direct family and in-laws I don't blast it on social media, I send it to the group chat that has direct family and in-laws in it. That's it, easy-peasy. Even my 70-something mother in-law participates in it.
- gwd 1y ago
  ...but you have to share it specifically with each separate group. When I take a cute photo of my son doing something, I have to share it with the family group for my side, and that of my wife; and none of my friends or random extended family get to see it. If my wife's fam shares a photo of my son that I think my fam wants to see, I have to manually port it over. Back in Facebook's heyday, I could just share it; or if my wife's fam tagged me in the photo, my family & friends would see it as well. And, of course, in group chat, your different friend groups never interact. One of the coolest thing about Facebook in its heyday was when two of your friends who didn't know each other had a cool conversation on your wall and then became friends themselves. Unfortunately there really doesn't seem to be a proper replacement -- BlueSky and Mastodon are replacements for Twitter, not Facebook. Group chats aren't as good, but they're the closest thing going.
  - parpfish 1y ago
    i actually think it's good that you need to explicitly share the photo with each group. people like getting a message that they know you decided you wanted them (or their little group) to see. if i see a photo that a friend broadcasts out once on a social feed, i see it and move on. if a friend puts a photo in a text/group chat, i know that it's something they wanted to share with me
  - simonask 1y ago
    Isn't it pretty common for the "share" function to allow selecting multiple recipients, including multiple groups?
    - esafak 1y ago
DoneWithAllThat 1y ago
I go to sci fi cons and telegram has become the de facto method of coordination for everything. Party, meal, event we all want to attend, any kind of meetup we create a channel for it to be used ephemerally and invite everyone who’s going. It’s a million times better than any event invite functionality of social networks, absolutely frictionless and without all the frankly stupid stuff social networks add.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
dev_l1x_be 1y ago
Say hello to iRC
comboy 1y ago
I bet kids these days don't even know how to do a hostile channel takeover with a bunch of eggdrops.
- trbleclef 1y ago
  *** Ja mata!
pier25 1y ago
The kids are alright. They are going back to IRC.
misswaterfairy 1y ago
Really makes you wonder if/when Discord goes IPO, that Meta would buy a controlling stake in it? Fortunately there are open source alternatives even if they aren't as popular as Discord at the moment, such as Revolt Chat: https://revolt.chat/ https://revolt.chat/ I miss the days of self-hosted forums; sadly it seems that algorithms, and the need to satisfy the need for 'instant' connection/information are ruining forums for young newcomers...
- mcflubbins 1y ago
  Revolt looks neat thanks for sharing.
dan_quixote 1y ago
I've seen the exact same and immediately my mind thinks of IRC :)
arrosenberg 1y ago
It's kind of obvious, right? Most of us grew up on AOL Instant Messenger (or, heaven forbid, MSN Messenger).
selfhoster 1y ago
I would totally welcome IRC back and USENET.
- immibis 1y ago
  They're both still alive. IRC: irc.libera.chat, irc.efnet.org, something rizon something; there's technically ircnet but don't bother Usenet: eternal-september.org - you might find others after a while but there are no other major free text servers. If you pay another company for binary access (these are mostly used for piracy) you can also use it for text though.
Gormo 1y ago
My "social media" in the '90s consisted largely of hanging out in IRC channels. Everything old is new again!
the_clarence 1y ago
I think you're right, but also groupchats allow you to create cliques which facebook never really offered as a feature. What they did offer was broadcasting lists which is not the same as a clique. Groups didn't really integrate cliques well IMO as they were more "public oriented" but they are probably the closest thing.
Aeolun 1y ago
I have chats for the parents in the class, parents from kindergarden, all the dads, my family, extended family. The list doesn’t end. It’s far, far better than Facebook though.
MarceliusK 1y ago
Kids shifting to group chats feels like a quiet rebellion against the algorithm-driven chaos of traditional social media
junto 1y ago
I see similar too. Both my teenagers got WhatsApp because we as parents had WhatsApp. They have slowly started using Signal in their friends groups. Now as a family we use Signal because the kids started us on it. We are based in Europe and iMessage is almost never used. I’m only on WhatsApp now because other parents are still using it. Sadly my oldest uses Instagram (on a strict daily timer), but apparently “it’s still cool to have an insta” and the killer feature there is that is super easy to network without sharing your phone number (I know signal also has this feature but it’s a bit hidden).
WhyNotHugo 1y ago
It’s the same for me (in my thirties). A decade ago, Instagram showed me photos that my friends shared. Today it’s ads, memes and other crap with a small proportion of photos of friends. The noise:signal ratio is so high that I don’t even bother. Facebook was the same a long time ago. Social media in the form it had 10-15 years ago has died. But I don’t think it’s an inevitable path: I think Meta has iterated in their services in a way that killed what was previously there.

bognition 1y ago

Group chat has always been the killer social app. 6 years ago I convinced my browser friends group to adopt Telegram and since then we’ve all abandoned FB, Instagram, etc… We have a ton of different threads all with different topics: kids, food, gardening, exercise, pets, memes, and a bunch of serious topic threads as well. It’s been incredibly effective at keeping us connected and engaged as we’ve all moved across the country and grow in an apart physically. The take away is; what people want from social media is to be connected with their real friends. However that isn’t as engaging as a random feed, so the companies push people away from that.

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
foobarian 1y ago
I'm in a similar group but using Discord. It seems that lack of advertising or any kind of algo feed is the common feature. Who runs your Telegram server?
- robrtsql 1y ago
  Do you mean 'run' as in run the community in some sort of administration sense? Telegram cannot be self-hosted (unless I am misinformed..).
  - balamatom 1y ago
    Neither can Discord; its usage of "server" in particular is a weaponized misappropriation.
    - Aeolun 1y ago
      I mean, their internal terminology is still guild. I’m not sure they intended to call it server until their userbase did?
      - balamatom 1y ago
        Muddling the meaning of the term "server" either way.
- balamatom 1y ago
  >Who runs your Telegram server? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Security_Service https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Security_Service
pookha 1y ago
I hate group chats (hate). It's a cliquey childish high-school cafeteria mode of communicating (thus why highschoolers use group chats). It's a clear step backwards and is representative of the covid-era stazi-like mentality people developed where they felt it was unsanity to share their views or life with the world at large (and maybe, given what we've learned about social media and nation-states, that's not without merit -- i.e the UK). Perfect world social media is a means of forming connections and expanding your little room(s).
- lukan 1y ago
  "Perfect world social media is a means of forming connections" What stops people from being part of X group chats? All a connection on their own?
- simonask 1y ago
  Is it - hear me out - possible that you are overthinking this? People tend to use group chats for coordination and quick banter with people they already know. Not as an alternative to the phpBB boards of old.
  - photonthug 1y ago
    Eh, I think the parent has a point. You underline it yourself when you say “people they already know”. The internet didn’t always involve a choice between “talk to people I know” vs “bravely/foolishly taking on the vitriol of a wild horde of angry delusional maniacs”, but now we’ve lost almost all of the space in between those extremes. People like hacker news exactly because it’s the rare place that’s still in the middle *(sometimes, on some topics, for now)
    - Aeolun 1y ago
      There’s a lot of people on hackernews with whom I cannot agree on a great many important things. Happily, none of them appear to be technical, so it works out fine.
  - balamatom 1y ago
wintermutestwin 1y ago
I guess group chat would be fine if all your friends are friends of each other. High School and college ages maybe, but as an older adult, I have so many different groups of people that I interact with that it would be obnoxious to deal with. I also find that there are certain people in group chats who are lonely and spam crap.
- sbarre 1y ago
  You can have many group chats though? I do that in Signal, I have group chats with different circles of friends ,and we also regularly create short-lived purpose-built chats for events or other things... It's a bit more friction perhaps but in the end it works well and we've been doing it for years.

nottorp 1y ago

Even facebook basically started as a group chat. Back when we all had pet dinosaurs in our back yards and you only saw what your friends post. This is a useful function as opposed to what the engagement algorithms push these days. So no wonder everyone moves to other options for group communication. You mean you don't have a "where do we go out this saturday" chat group with your friends circle?

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

jjani 1y ago

I never understood why they became less popular when mobile phones took over. Even in the 00s so many people were already in group chats through MSN, ICQ and so on. All Microsoft had to do was make the former into a proper mobile app. Instead they wasted billions on Skype to replace their golden opportunity.

burkaman 1y ago
Did they become less popular? I think they are just less visible by nature, they've always been pretty common. I guess some people switched to Facebook Groups for a time, but even that is sort of a form of group chat.
foobarian 1y ago
They never worked properly on phones, including images/video and history. Same for SMS chats on top of being hideously expensive because the phone companies thought it was still the 1960s.
- iforgotpassword 1y ago
  Yes, that's why they should have made them work properly. Simply put the main problem was that those old IMs required a persistent connection to the server when you "just" had to add a new protocol that can do session resumption/polling. Then make a pretty mobile UI and make it possible to find other users by phone number - imo this was the number one reason why WhatsApp and iMessage won. It's an app on your phone, so it uses your phone number, not another artificial number or name or mail address - it's something the most tech illiterate gets. Because then it's just "SMS but with groups and photos". But you could have allowed to merge it with your existing account from desktop times, so all the young hip people would've kept all their contacts.
  - bentcorner 1y ago
    IIRC one of the reasons WhatsApp has done so well is that they basically supported every platform under the sun, which was a technical challenge back in the day. These days the field is much narrower but 10+ years ago finding an app that supported everyone's device was a challenge.

hylaride 1y ago

It's been that way for awhile, though they do use instagram and/or tiktok for consumption. iMessage is (was?) a very sticky product for Apple as kids with android get cut out of chats. There's nothing worse for teens that exclusion. The kids have been taught the dangers of sharing things on the internet, so the risk is minimized sharing in private chats (though obviously still there).

FireBeyond 1y ago
> iMessage is (was?) a very sticky product for Apple as kids with android get cut out of chats. There's nothing worse for teens that exclusion. Craig Federighi fought against supporting iMessage on Android and RCS for a long time saying, quote, "It would remove obstacles towards iPhone families being able to give their kids Android phones."
handfuloflight 1y ago
> iMessage is (was?) a very sticky product for Apple as kids with android get cut out of chats. There's nothing worse for teens that exclusion. Are kids really that simplistically divided?
- dcchambers 1y ago
  100%. iMessage is THE number one thing selling iphones these days, and has been for a long time.
  - handfuloflight 1y ago
    But why does it matter if the majority of cellular plans provide unlimited texting?
    - tmpz22 1y ago
      Its about the extra features iMessage has because of Apple's superset of the underlying SMS/MMS functionality. Its also about having a blue bubble (not-poor) versus a green bubble (poor). It defies belief how much some demographics care about this stuff, I didn't believe it when I first heard either. Some of it is improving with RCS but its got a ways to go.

morkalork 1y ago

Group chats are: free, have no ads, and sharing is with exactly who you intend. When I want to send a photo to direct family and in-laws I don't blast it on social media, I send it to the group chat that has direct family and in-laws in it. That's it, easy-peasy. Even my 70-something mother in-law participates in it.

gwd 1y ago
...but you have to share it specifically with each separate group. When I take a cute photo of my son doing something, I have to share it with the family group for my side, and that of my wife; and none of my friends or random extended family get to see it. If my wife's fam shares a photo of my son that I think my fam wants to see, I have to manually port it over. Back in Facebook's heyday, I could just share it; or if my wife's fam tagged me in the photo, my family & friends would see it as well. And, of course, in group chat, your different friend groups never interact. One of the coolest thing about Facebook in its heyday was when two of your friends who didn't know each other had a cool conversation on your wall and then became friends themselves. Unfortunately there really doesn't seem to be a proper replacement -- BlueSky and Mastodon are replacements for Twitter, not Facebook. Group chats aren't as good, but they're the closest thing going.
- parpfish 1y ago
  i actually think it's good that you need to explicitly share the photo with each group. people like getting a message that they know you decided you wanted them (or their little group) to see. if i see a photo that a friend broadcasts out once on a social feed, i see it and move on. if a friend puts a photo in a text/group chat, i know that it's something they wanted to share with me
- simonask 1y ago
  Isn't it pretty common for the "share" function to allow selecting multiple recipients, including multiple groups?
  - esafak 1y ago

DoneWithAllThat 1y ago

I go to sci fi cons and telegram has become the de facto method of coordination for everything. Party, meal, event we all want to attend, any kind of meetup we create a channel for it to be used ephemerally and invite everyone who’s going. It’s a million times better than any event invite functionality of social networks, absolutely frictionless and without all the frankly stupid stuff social networks add.

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

dev_l1x_be 1y ago

Say hello to iRC

comboy 1y ago

I bet kids these days don't even know how to do a hostile channel takeover with a bunch of eggdrops.

trbleclef 1y ago
*** Ja mata!

pier25 1y ago

The kids are alright. They are going back to IRC.

misswaterfairy 1y ago

Really makes you wonder if/when Discord goes IPO, that Meta would buy a controlling stake in it? Fortunately there are open source alternatives even if they aren't as popular as Discord at the moment, such as Revolt Chat: https://revolt.chat/ https://revolt.chat/ I miss the days of self-hosted forums; sadly it seems that algorithms, and the need to satisfy the need for 'instant' connection/information are ruining forums for young newcomers...

mcflubbins 1y ago
Revolt looks neat thanks for sharing.

dan_quixote 1y ago

I've seen the exact same and immediately my mind thinks of IRC :)

arrosenberg 1y ago

It's kind of obvious, right? Most of us grew up on AOL Instant Messenger (or, heaven forbid, MSN Messenger).

selfhoster 1y ago

I would totally welcome IRC back and USENET.

immibis 1y ago
They're both still alive. IRC: irc.libera.chat, irc.efnet.org, something rizon something; there's technically ircnet but don't bother Usenet: eternal-september.org - you might find others after a while but there are no other major free text servers. If you pay another company for binary access (these are mostly used for piracy) you can also use it for text though.

Gormo 1y ago

My "social media" in the '90s consisted largely of hanging out in IRC channels. Everything old is new again!

the_clarence 1y ago

I think you're right, but also groupchats allow you to create cliques which facebook never really offered as a feature. What they did offer was broadcasting lists which is not the same as a clique. Groups didn't really integrate cliques well IMO as they were more "public oriented" but they are probably the closest thing.

Aeolun 1y ago

I have chats for the parents in the class, parents from kindergarden, all the dads, my family, extended family. The list doesn’t end. It’s far, far better than Facebook though.

MarceliusK 1y ago

Kids shifting to group chats feels like a quiet rebellion against the algorithm-driven chaos of traditional social media

junto 1y ago

I see similar too. Both my teenagers got WhatsApp because we as parents had WhatsApp. They have slowly started using Signal in their friends groups. Now as a family we use Signal because the kids started us on it. We are based in Europe and iMessage is almost never used. I’m only on WhatsApp now because other parents are still using it. Sadly my oldest uses Instagram (on a strict daily timer), but apparently “it’s still cool to have an insta” and the killer feature there is that is super easy to network without sharing your phone number (I know signal also has this feature but it’s a bit hidden).

WhyNotHugo 1y ago

It’s the same for me (in my thirties). A decade ago, Instagram showed me photos that my friends shared. Today it’s ads, memes and other crap with a small proportion of photos of friends. The noise:signal ratio is so high that I don’t even bother. Facebook was the same a long time ago. Social media in the form it had 10-15 years ago has died. But I don’t think it’s an inevitable path: I think Meta has iterated in their services in a way that killed what was previously there.